All My Road Before Me

by C. S. Lewis

  At last I succeeded in getting a pause in which I made everyone agree that his way of reading Spenser was a peculiarity of his own, not a manifestation of the moral tendencies of our generation. I then had a smart bit of fence with him and actually succeeded in shutting him up for a while. This was not really a dialectical feat, for he was talking nonsense that would go over at a touch. My only merit was that by saying ‘Wait a moment!’ in a loud voice I succeeded in making him hear my answer. I did not hear a single enlightening remark from anyone all afternoon.

  I left with Coghill and Martley, both of whom complimented me on my paper.24 At tea in his rooms, besides us three, were Coghill’s younger brother (a subaltern, his guest) and a fool called Cuthbert.25 We talked about spiritualism, dreams and futurism: pretty silly, but I should have liked Coghill if I had got him alone.

  So home on foot and to supper. Worked afterwards. On getting into bed I was attacked by a series of gloomy thoughts about professional and literary failure—what Barfield calls ‘one of those moments when one is afraid that one may not be a great man after all’.

  Saturday 10 February: . . . After lunch I had to go into town again to return books to the English Library. While I was there looking in vain for more information about Prometheus Strick came in and began to talk to me. We began of course by a few criticisms of Darlow. Strick doesn’t think much of Gordon or of any of the English dons except Simpson. He said Raleigh had been dead sick of the English School before he died, ‘It was life that interested him.’ This agrees with what Jenkin has often said.

  He talked to me for a long time. I can only describe what he was like by saying that without returning to any one subject too often or doing anything to suggest a fixed idea, he gave me the impression of a man with a fixed idea . . .

  Sunday 11 February: . . . A beautiful springlike morning with great sunshine. I called at Exeter and found that Coghill and his brother were there—the soldier brother being still in his dressing gown. Coghill however was ready and we walked out at once. We went via Lake Street and S. Hinksey up to Thessaly and down by Ferry Hinksey. We talked on a great many subjects.

  He apparently has been great friends with the Earp, Childe, Crowe and Harris set. I said I had been rather taken up by them in 1919 but not quite taken in. He defended them, but agreed with most of my criticisms . . .

  I found to my relief that he has still an open mind on ultimate questions: he spoke contemptuously of the cheap happiness obtainable by people who shut themselves up in a system of belief. When in doubt he is still quite content with the Promethean attitude: if God doesn’t aim at what we call good, so much the worse for God. He is quite confident in the sanctions of one’s own impulse and says you must take it for final. He seems very ignorant of literature and thinks music the greater art, because it can do two things at once. He is quite right there. He agreed with me that women were bores until they were forty.

  We went into the pub at Ferry Hinksey where an old customer informed us in whispers that it was before time. When the beer was brought we had a lot of talk from this old fellow—about prospects for the boat race, his early days as a boxer, and other pleasant themes. We parted at the Turl.

  Home and had lunch. Afterwards came Sidney and I had an hour and a half with her. I find it impossible to make her do any serious preparation for me. After tea, having first written to my father, I began to work on my ‘Requiem’. Worked as hard as I have ever done on a poem, trying to resist all my clichés, shortcuts and other original sins . . .

  Monday 12 February: A thick fog this morning. Dorothy came back today after her long absence. D gave her a great telling off about all the things which have come to light while she has been doing the work herself and told her that she must do things in our way or clear out. Dorothy seems to have taken it very well.

  After breakfast I walked to Schools and heard the Cad’s lecture. Wynn came and sat next to me:26 according to my invariable custom with new acquaintances I gave him a full list of all the Cad’s enormities and he seemed duly impressed. He says he thinks we shall have no sound laws etc. this year and seems to think that Miss Wardale is going too deeply into it with me.

  Walked home again. After lunch I walked over to Iffley and got back my Wordsworth from the Doc’s rooms: I then crossed the river—there is a fine rush of water at the new weir—intending to go down by Sandford, but it was such a marsh in the meadows that I turned back. I then walked up the field path opposite the church, reading the opening of the last book of the Excursion. I tried the experiment of treating it as real philosophy, taking it as prose and trying to follow the thought conscientiously. The result was rather discreditable either to me or to Wordsworth, I am not sure which. What has the ‘active principle’ in all things got to do with the passage (a fine passage) about old age? . . .

  Coming home again I sat down to work a little more on my ‘Requiem’ when Cranny arrived. He seemed in much better form, tho’ his exchange is still hanging fire . . . Cranny was somehow funnier than usual today. He talked so hard at tea that at first we couldn’t get him to help himself at all: at last, under pressure, he stretched out his hand absent-mindedly and took the whole half of a cake.

  Today, for the first time, I found out something that Cranny really believes: that is, the moral order of the world as manifested in history. He gives various examples. He said the fall of all empires based on force was the central fact. The Hebrew prophets did not of course foretell particular historical facts but they were prophetic in the sense of seeing this moral order. This is the nearest approach to a religion I have ever heard from him and I was impressed at the time: though I decided afterwards that it would be better to believe in pardons than to see moral order in the change from Rome to the Middle Ages.

  After tea he left and I worked on the Vth Canto of ‘Dymer’, not without a little success: feeling as confident today as I was depressed yesterday, wh. shows how much worth either mood is.

  D has a tiresome cough tonight, and has had a sore back (of which she had said nothing) for the last few days—doubtless the result of the unusual work. She struck out a most excellent phrase tonight, saying of Dalkey, where houses of all kinds are mixed together, that it looked as they had been rained from heaven. I at once hailed this as literature and announced my intention of stealing it . . .

  Tuesday 13 February: Worked on Beowulf, revising, most of the morning and then bicycled to Manor Place where I read my essay on Milton to Wilson. Quite an interesting hour tho’ I don’t know that I learnt anything new . . .

  Afterwards I began Dryden. Started him with great good will and managed to raise some feeble appreciation of the Cromwell stanzas: but the Astraea Redux seemed to me such unutterable sawdust that I relapsed into my usual view of the Augustans . . .

  D was very miserable all today: I discovered finally that her finger joints were bothering her and also forebodings as to how bad they might become. If only we could move to drier ground! Began this evening to read Tess of the d’Urbervilles aloud.

  Wednesday 14 February: . . . After lunch I walked into Schools and worked all afternoon supplementing my Spenser paper with a short review of Wyatt, Surrey and Sackville. On reaching home for tea I was greeted with the cheering news that Jenkin had been here and would come to the Martlets tonight. From tea to supper time I worked on and completed my paper.

  Then after supper I bussed to College. Going into the J.C.R. I found Jenkin sitting with Terry, Robson-Scott and Fasnacht. I seated myself on the floor and we talked until it was time to repair to Anderson’s rooms in Durham buildings—new rooms where I have never been before. They are divided into two by an arch and are quite pretty. Present were Anderson,27 R-Scott, Curtis, Terry, Jenkin, McKissack, Rink, and Keir. Arrangements were made about the dinner next week when the Cambridge Martlets were coming.

  My paper was very kindly received. In the discussion the conception of γάνος raised a lot of talk of a rather aimless kind—was there γάνος in Lear? Was there
in Tamburlaine etc.? I had, in my paper, applied Murray’s view of Pindar to Spenser, i.e. he failed to be a great poet because he was only a poet. This presently led to an argument of which the skeleton was something like this.

  RINK: ‘Do you say that a work of art cannot be the greatest in kind if it is only art?’

  SELF: ‘Certainly.’

  RINK: ‘But can’t it be judged and oughtn’t it to be judged just as art?’

  SELF: ‘Well taking art as an expression it must be the expression of something: and one can’t abstract the “something” from the expression.’

  RINK: Stated Croce’s position.

  SELF: ‘You can’t judge it simply as expression, in practice. A lyric which perfectly expressed the pleasure of scratching wd. not really be judged equal to Lear.’

  RINK: ‘But it would be, quâ art.’

  SELF: ‘But not quâ thing.’

  RINK: ‘Perhaps not: but it could be criticised just as art without reference to its further nature as thing and that is what Croce means.’

  SELF: ‘I suggest that the object of a work of art is not to be criticised but to be experienced and enjoyed. And that which appeals to the whole man must be greater than that which appeals to part of the man.’

  RINK: ‘I don’t think so, provided the emotion of the artist is perfectly expressed.’

  SELF: ‘That’s all right, if you consider the artist alone. But you forget that art is a social thing.’

  ROBSON-SCOTT and RINK (together): ‘Oh no, certainly not, you can’t mean that.’

  SELF: ‘Why not? Isn’t the object of the artist to communicate his emotion?’

  RINK: ‘Oh! Then you make art not expression but communication?’

  SELF: ‘Yes. I’m sorry I said expression before. I mean communication.’

  RINK: ‘But is it not disinterested? Does the artist, while at work, think about an audience or about anything but perfect expression?’

  SELF: ‘No artist has ever taken that view. Why are all artists so eager to be understood? Why do they bother to alter their first drafts?’

  RINK: ‘To express more perfectly.’

  TERRY: ‘Mere jottings might be the most expressive of all—to the artist.’

  SELF: ‘The artist goes on altering phrases which are merely expressive to himself and hunting for those which will reproduce the right emotion in the audience.’

  JENKIN: ‘Yes, I agree with that.’

  KEIR: ‘Keats’ first draft of the Nightingale was found scattered all over the garden: so he had no idea of communication.’

  JENKIN: ‘That was mere accident—carelessness.’

  RINK: ‘But how can the essence of art depend upon its being communicative? If an Athenian had written Wagnerian music it would have communicated nothing to his contemporaries but it would have been art.’

  SELF: ‘I don’t mean what “happens to communicate” in fact: but what is “such as to be communicative”, tho’ of course mere accidents—e.g. a MS getting lost—may prevent it ever actually arousing the right emotion.’

  FASNACHT: ‘Potentially communicative?’

  SELF: ‘Yes, I suppose so.’

  TERRY: ‘But almost anything would be that. A mere sign would be communicative to a person who happened to have the same associations as the artist.’

  RINK: ‘No, communication won’t do: it will have to be expression.’

  SELF: ‘What do you mean by expression, if you don’t mean what is potentially communicative?’

  RINK: ‘I mean that which embodies the form of the artist’s experience.’

  SELF: ‘Form in the Platonic sense?’

  RINK: ‘Not exactly—I mean like the form of a penny.’

  SELF: ‘That comes to the Platonic form. That which corresponds to the round form of the penny, in a pain say, is Painfulness. You don’t mean that the expression of the particular pain is the concept of painfulness?’

  RINK: ‘There’s a difference. There are many pennies but every emotion is unique.’

  SELF: ‘Well can you talk about form and content in a unique thing?’

  RINK: ‘Why not?’

  SELF: ‘Well take the whole. Is its form inside it or out and what happens in either case?’

  FASNACHT: ‘It is neither, it is diffused.’

  SELF: ‘Can you distinguish it in this case from the particular?’

  FASNACHT: ‘The difficulty comes not from the uniqueness of the Whole but from its Wholeness.’

  RINK: ‘In any case, I take back Form in that sense. I really think I mean the form you impose on the experience. As perception is the forming of sensation.’

  SELF: ‘But do you impose that? Isn’t it given?’

  RINK: ‘Oh no—for instance I impose form on that lamp. If it was on the edge of vision it would have none.’

  FASNACHT: ‘But that isn’t a mental operation, it’s the turning of your head.’

  SELF: ‘Yes, the form depends on your body: but to you, as Mind, it’s part of the given.’

  (This led to a longish argument on ‘sensations when not attended to’—were they sensations?—and so on to a discussion of the Ego. Did it exist when not filled by an object? Rink thought it did potentially. I trotted out my favourite argument about the potential being always resident in the lower actual, greatly to Fasnacht’s amusement. Rink said the actual in which potential subjectivity resided was the spirit unknown in its essence. We then returned to our muttons.)

  RINK (having abandoned the word Form as hopeless): ‘The work of art is the crystallised emotion—the emotion made permanent.’

  FASNACHT: ‘Made permanent in whose mind?’

  RINK: ‘I mean potentially permanent.’

  SELF: ‘Doesn’t that mean, capable of rearousing the original experience?’

  RINK: ‘Well yes.’

  SELF: ‘Then the issue is that I think art is communication, you make it auto-communication.’

  RINK: ‘The work of art is capable of recreating the original experience but that is an accident of it.’

  SELF: ‘Well what is its essence?’

  RINK: ‘I don’t think I can put it into words. What I object to is making its essence depend on the future and on its contingent success in reproducing the experience. I want to make it retrospectively what this makes it in the future.’

  We all now agreed that we had a certain inkling of what he meant. I said this was certainly not what I meant by art: in fact it stood to art as——. Rink walked part of the way back with me and invited me to lunch tomorrow . . .

  Thursday 15 February: . . . Again today—it is happening much too often now—I am haunted by fears for the future, as to whether I will ever get a job and whether I shall ever be able to write good poetry.

  This spring term seems always rather nasty: last year it was Mary and the Brat, to whom may Malebolge be hospitable, the year before that it was the Jeffries.

  Friday 16 February: D stayed in bed today, very bad indeed with her violent cold and neuralgia. After breakfast I made another attempt to get something out of Wyld: but after despairing I finished the Ancrene Riwle and went on with Sir Gawain . . .

  I then went to Schools for the Discussion Class. I was for some time alone with Payne who seems a pleasant fellow.28 The others gradually arrived and Macdonald read a short and very bad paper on the adapters of Shakespeare in a monstrous high pitched voice with a Scotch accent.29 The discussion which followed was pretty poor, but better than usual. Darlow was fairly silent.30 The only really amusing thing was Coghill’s minutes in Chaucerian verse, which, excluding some lapses, were good . . .

  Wednesday 21 February: . . . I proceeded to 14 Longwall Street to lunch with Rink. He provided a very pleasing lunch of salad, cheese, jam, tangerines, dates, walnuts and coffee . . .

  Shortly before three we went out for a walk. It was only after this that we began to progress. I started a new attack on expressionism on the ground that it didn’t (by his definition) cover the phenomena of failure. He ha
d defined expression as the pure disinterested and intelligent consequences of experience. I said this described a bad poem as well as a good one. He failed to defend by an examination of ‘intelligent’ but finally cut me off by inserting ‘complete’ in his definition. Having thus come to a temporary standstill we reversed positions and he attacked my theory. In spite of many well contested points I was gravelled in the end by the simple question of communicative to how many . . . He had distinctly the honours today . . .

  Coming in, I found the two Raymonds here. He is moving soon and will let his house for three years if he can’t sell it. As D said afterwards, this means he will get high rent, get the house done up by the tenant and retire thither with all to the good. After tea I was left with him in the dining room and endured wonderful boredom.

  I was the more annoyed by hearing the Doc come in. At last Father Raymond made a move. The Doc had just gone as we two came out of the dining room. I found D in great distress about him and at her suggestion ran after him to see if I could have a chat. I did not overtake him till the end of Magdalen Road. He was walking very stiffly, but that is not uncommon. He was rather abstracted: talked about immortality. At Iffley Turn I left him and came home by bus.

  D said he had seemed in great worry and ready to break down: in the very few minutes which she had had alone with him on the doorstep he had said that he was going down to Bristol to see a specialist. D is afraid it is cancer. I tried to take the view that doctors often imagine things in their own case: but indeed the poor old Doc is the last man to do so. D cried out against the old enemy—fate and all. As we said, he is the most unoffending, the gentlest, the most unselfish man imaginable . . .

  Friday 23 February: . . . Mary and the Doc came before lunch. D told me the Doc was very bad and must stay here. After lunch he began raving. Quieted later and explained that he was haunted by horrible blasphemous and obscene thoughts. Talked quietly a long time with me alone. Had two more bad attacks before tea—very violent. The third was the worse. Thinks (while in the fit) that he is going to Hell. Dr Hichens came in the evening. After his visit Doc told Mary and D that he was doomed—lunacy and death. Traced it to V.D. in his College days. D said he was quite lucid but exaggerated repentance and misery something incredible . . .