All My Road Before Me

by C. S. Lewis

  WILSON, Frank Percy (1889–1963)—Lewis’s tutor in English—took a BA in English from the University of Birmingham, and then a B.Litt. at Lincoln College, Oxford, on Thomas Dekker. He was in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment during World War I and was badly wounded on the Somme. He returned to Oxford in 1920 as a University lecturer, and was appointed Reader in 1927. He was Professor of English at the University of Leeds 1929–36, and Merton Professor of English Literature at Oxford 1947–57. He was, with Bonamy Dobrée, the general editor of the Oxford History of English Literature, and he invited Lewis to write English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (1954).

  WYLD, Henry Cecil Kennedy (1870–1945), philologist and lexicographer, was educated at the universities of Bonn and Heidelberg and then at Corpus Christi, Oxford, where he studied philology, phonetic and linguistics with Henry Sweet. He took a BA from Oxford in 1899 and was appointed a lecturer in the English language at University College, Liverpool. In 1904 the University of Liverpool elected him first Baines Professor of English Language and Literature. He remained at Liverpool until 1920 and by teaching, lecturing and writing he established himself among the foremost philologists of the country. It was then that he wrote his Historical Study of the Mother Tongue (1906) and A Short History of English (1914). In 1930 he was elected Merton Professor of English Language and Literature in the University of Oxford, with a Fellowship at Merton. At Oxford he completed his Studies in English Rhymes (1923) and wrote the Universal Dictionary of the English Language (1932).

  MAGDALEN COLLEGE APPENDIX

  In the same notebook in which Lewis wrote the last portion of his diary he included ‘portraits’ of nine of his colleagues at Magdalen College. All nine are printed here, for they seem to have been intended as illustrations to the diary. Unfortunately, Lewis stopped keeping a diary before he had mentioned Edward Hope and Stephen Lee, but I have retained his descriptions of them.

  BENECKE, Paul Victor Mendelssohn (1868–1944) was the great-grandson of the composer Felix Mendelssohn. He was elected a Fellow of Magdalen in 1893 and taught Classics until his retirement in 1925. Lewis gives this portrait of him:

  ‘Simplicissima Psyche. He has a face of extraordinary beauty and carries his head a little tilted upwards and his body very straight though he is old. He is a fast and furious walker and strong, but his hands shaky. He takes his bath cold, drinks no wine, fasts on Fridays, rises very early, and misses no services in Chapel. He is regarded by some as a saintly man, by others as an old woman, and both are right.

  ‘His holiness he shows clearly, not by his asceticism, but by his wise and curious understanding of beasts. He said at one time that he saw well why the Indians found in the elephant a manifestation of the divine: and at another that the life of every animal appeared sad and empty from the outside, and that the melancholy in a dog’s eyes was its pity for men. It is only on this subject that he speaks with confidence.

  ‘For the most part he cannot advance a proposition without at once qualifying it, and then again modifying the qualification, so that no one knows at the end the purport of his speech as a whole. This hesitation, which amounts to a kind of mental stammer, makes him ineffectual at meetings and committees, where he speaks often and long, not for the love of his own voice (for it is visibly nervous and unhappy), but because he conceives it to be a duty.

  ‘For the same reason it is commonly he who talks to a tedious guest or shy newcomer. If anyone is rude to him he thinks the fault was his own and apologizes. He is ridiculed behind his back, and sometimes insulted to his face, by younger men, and was never seen to be angry. He seldom leaves the College, and if he does, it is to stay with his sister. The College is his wife and children and his mother and father: he knows all its statutes as well as his Prayer Book, and forgets no one who has belonged to it for many generations.

  ‘His leisure is consumed in charitable and educational works. If the formation of a school or a society, or the running of a hospital, involves any dull and laborious work of organisation or correspondence, that work is sure to fall to him. He has the air of a man who has never looked for thanks and very seldom got them. His greatest pleasure is in music: and there even those who despise him find it necessary to reverence his judgement.’

  CRAIG, Edwin Stewart (1865–1939). He was a Demonstrator in the Electrical Laboratory of the University of Oxford 1905–13. He was a Fellow of Magdalen 1918–30, during which time he was Vice-President of the College 1926–28, and Registrar of the University of Oxford 1924–30. Lewis gives this portrait of him:

  ‘The Bureaucrat. He has the face of a colonel or a civil servant rather than that of a scholar: ruddy of complexion, with heavy folds in the cheek, smiling lips, and a neat “toothbrush moustache”. He is very bronzed: he goes very neatly dressed and well groomed and contrives always to carry about him the air of the great world—as if a little bit of Whitehall or the Foreign Office had come among us.

  At his first appearance he shows himself of all men the hardest to overlook, or to use with flippancy: his very face and voice carry the sort of authority that comes from long familiarity with business, faultless breeding, the habit of command, and the consciousness of having a place in the system of things. Alone of the older men he is treated by his juniors with invariable respect. He silences opposition by his perfect knowledge of procedure and knows well how to meet an argument not with a contrary argument but with a point of order: or, not seldom, by a silence at the right moment or a mere raising of his eyebrows. He is aware of his own powers, but by no means vain.

  He is always kindly, but his kindness is more distant than the ill-temper of others. To his seniors, or to dignitaries from without, his manners are irresistible and produce at once, without servility, all that servility aims at. With all these resources, he has neither serious nor original designs whereon to use them. What his power enforces has often been suggested to him by others, or by mere precedent: he has been described as the incarnation of an agenda paper. He is by no means proof against flattery: still less against the boyish charm of an undergraduate with a clean face and a good family. Propriety, decency, expediency, he well understands: good and evil would seem to him rather bad form.

  He has been engaged in business so long that he has forgotten all intellectual interests. His reading is trash: his pleasures entirely sensual: he is a good judge of cookery, of wine, and of spirits. He is ageing rapidly and bears his infirmities with great courage as to the dangers, and no patience at all as to the discomforts.’

  DIXON, Arthur Lee (1867–1955). He was a Fellow of Merton College 1891–1922, and Fellow of Magdalen and Waynflete Professor of Pure Mathematics 1922–45. Lewis says of him:

  ‘Epicuri de grege Porcus. He is a tousle-headed man with a ragged moustache, now grey, but showing traces of reddish-yellow. Having come here late in life he is junior to most of those who are younger than himself: this, combined with the possession of an invalid wife at Folkestone, gives him an unattached air. He is the cheerful spectator of all that goes on about him, but seldom takes the stage himself. He seems to have slipped into the college as an experienced traveller slips into a crowded railway carriage: giving no trouble to others, yet easily making himself comfortable because he knows how to fit in anywhere. He is happy here, and would be happy at the North Pole or in the last trench: he looks as if he had never met a man whom he could not get on with. He loves a good murder story or a good epic poem, a good conceit or a good game of bowls, a good philosopher or a good charwoman, with the same impartiality.

  ‘His knowledge is very great and yet no one would think of him as a learned man. He talks to all of us so readily on our own subjects that one forgets he has a subject of his own: or rather, mathematics seem to lie so easily side by side with Ovid, Tasso, golf, Kant, Gilbert & Sullivan, Trollope, and French inns, that it appears as one of the normal human interests. It is a mere accident whether a man happens to include mathematics among his hobbies—as it is an accident whether he includes draughts.
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  ‘He is a man who seems to have solved the problem of living, without (what is rare) turning egoist in the process. As far as a man can go on the purely world level—without divine discontents or ultimate misgivings or crying for the moon—so far he has gone. A man to be depended on to the end: he is at peace, like the animals, but with the added charm of reason: a good man, a good (almost a great) gentleman, but no more spiritual than the worst degenerate in whom—for everything else—one would find his opposite. If he had physical beauty he would be the Pagan ideal of the “good man” perfectly realised.’

  HOPE, Edward (1886–1953) was educated at Manchester University and Magdalen College. He was a Fellow and Tutor in Chemistry at Magdalen from 1919 until his retirement. Lewis wrote of him:

  ‘Natura apis. By his appearance he is a black Celt. A little, dark, fragile man, so quiet and self contained that you would take him for a sneak if he were not obviously honest, and for a mystic if he were not obviously commonplace. He is a son of the people, still carrying strange Northern provincialisms in his speech, and noisy over his food. No one ever disliked him. His life is in his science: he lives isolated among us laymen and in the simplicity of his heart supposes all men to be as expert in their own studies as he is in his. He is no talker. He minds his own business: for working hours, science, and for leisure hours, his own digestion. This is bad, and is the only theme on which he is eloquent.

  ‘This is one of those men in whom knowledge and intellect have taken up their abode without making any difference: they are added on to a decent drab nonentity of character, and the character has not been transformed. If you wiped out his technical knowledge there would be nothing left to distinguish him from any respectable shopkeeper in the Tottenham Court Road. Yet he is not vulgar: for conceit, sham-gentility, and greed of money or attention, have never crossed his mind. A modest, able, laborious, charitable, unpretentious little man, whom no one could describe without wishing to be able to speak of him more favourably than truth will allow.’

  LEE, Stephen Grosvenor (1889–1962) was an undergraduate at Magdalen 1908–12, where he read History. He was Assistant Master at King’s School, Worchester, 1912–13, and a Lecturer at Magdalen 1913–14. During the War he was a Captain in the 6th Rifle Brigade 1914–18. He was a Fellow and Tutor in Modern History at Magdalen 1920–47, and of him Lewis wrote:

  ‘He is a well-looking, clean-limbed, open-air sort of man like the hero of a lady’s first novel: his teeth very white, his eye clear, clean-shaven. Though no fool, he is out of his place in a college: if he could take his charming wife and lusty children with him and be set down on a hundred acres of farm in the colonies he would have found his vocation. He has far too much sense of duty to neglect his work—he comes of God-fearing dissenting stock—but the term is a weariness to him, and he is never happy till he has taken his family away to his little Welsh bungalow among the heather and crags of the Gower peninsula, where he can spend the day hewing wood and drawing water. He would sooner handle a spade than all the pens that ever were, and covets a saddle more than any professional chair.

  ‘Of all this, that is visible to everyone else, he is only dimly conscious himself. He thinks himself lazy because his heart does not turn to his work: though in reality his energy is unbounded, and what is left over from teaching pupils and bathing the children goes upon boy-scouts and the League of Nations. By a paradox (which is no paradox to those that understand him) he is, on the one hand, a very modest, and even a humble man, who would learn from anyone: on the other, the distance between him and those who really [are] of the scholarly type, is a thing that he has never dreamed of. He would be too good to feel anger if anyone tried to show it to him: but it would be impossible for him to understand.’

  MACKEITH, Malcolm Henry (1895–1942). He was Fellow and Tutor of Magdalen College 1922–33, Demonstrator in the University Department of Human Anatomy 1921–23, University Demonstrator in Pharmacology 1922–33, and Dean of the Medical School 1930–33. Lewis gave this portrait of him:

  ‘A sprawling, slouching sort of man who sits most often with his chair tilted at an angle of forty five degrees, his hands in his pockets, and his coat unbuttoned, swinging his legs. His face is sleepy-looking and wears usually a sly smile, as of a knowing yokel. It is so natural to imagine him with a straw in his mouth that one hardly knows whether one remembers to have seen it there in fact or no. He speaks in a nasal twang, very slowly.

  ‘He has all the appearance of good nature, though he is not known to have done anyone a service. He has never been seen angry, nor sorry. He goes in the company of those who always have their own way and gets his share, but without violence. It is as if he used them as they use the rest of us. When one of his confederates has cleared the way with a savage exposition of realpolitik and the other has paved it with precedents and formalities, he heaves onto his feet, speaks some halting words that tire but half conciliate his opponents and relapses heavily into his chair.

  ‘He thinks he knows a thing or two, but has not yet reached the level of cynicism. He lives in a farmer’s world where over-reaching and under-mining are taken for granted, and nothing could be more simple minded than his honest pride in deceiving his colleagues. As he has never suspected the existence of any different world, he feels no need to defend himself by a conscious doctrine of cynicism. He thinks that he only does a little better what all men invariably do as well as they can: and while realising that the beaten party in a deal will grumble, he could not understand the kind of animosity that his actions really arouse.

  ‘He differs by the whole width of the sky from our first character [Weldon]: as the unconscious from the conscious: as the pagan from the apostate: as the naïf rogue, at peace with his world of roguery, differs from the defiant apostle of immoralism. You might say that they differed as earth from iron—but only if you remember that earth can eat iron up, slowly, without noticing it. Being entirely happy, he is good company. He will never go to hell—the gallows would be quite enough to settle his purely human, and even touching, account.’

  PARKER, Michael Denne (1894–1972). He was a Fellow and Tutor in Ancient History at Magdalen 1926–45. Lewis usually referred to him as the ‘Wounded Buffalo’ or ‘Wounded Bison’, and gave this picture of him:

  ‘The plain man. He is a picture of rude health. His face is very red and rough, like a beefsteak, the lips thick, the jaw heavy and usually thrust out to support a heavy pipe. He has a slouch in his walk, like an athlete off duty, and goes with his hands (which are hairy and like the hands of a workman) in his pockets.

  ‘He thinks of himself as a plain man with no nonsense about him, and hopes that even his enemies regard him as an honest fellow at bottom, and that even cleverer and more subtle men allow him to be a good judge of a practical matter. The desire to be always exercising this shrewd practical common sense leads him to endless discussions on everything that happens: he will draw anyone who listens into a corner and stand there exchanging husky confidences about his pupils and colleagues as long as you will. Whatever his audience may be he always implies that “we two (or three, or four) are the only people in College who understand this matter and we must hold together”. The very same people against whom he marshalls his confidants on Wednesday will themselves be taken into council on Thursday.

  ‘His passion for feeling that he holds the reins and is in the secret thus gives him the appearance (and, in practice, the qualities) of an unscrupulous intriguer: but not the guilt, for he is as innocent as a schoolboy playing at secret societies. He believes all that he says for the moment, but being as weak as water, takes a new colour from every group he falls into. What you say to him carelessly and in public one day, he will bring back to you the next day, in perfect good faith, as an original idea of his own to be communicated in close secret, with a wink and a nod—verbum sapienti. The habit is now so settled on him that even when he is only borrowing your matches or passing the time of day, he sidles up to you in such a manner that anyo
ne out of earshot would think he was discussing the destiny of the University.

  ‘He is not a man of intellect. He reads (beyond his subject) nothing but detective stories, and has no taste for any of the arts. His pleasures are those of an athlete. His humour is raillery and banter: rough bludgeon work bordering on the clownish. His temper is easily raised and easily appeased. Of morals his highest reach is a blunt hatred of unchastity and a public schoolboy’s belief in the value of watching cricket matches. Both are sincere and he would probably boast of being unable to give his reasons for either.’

  SEGAR, Robert (1879–1961). He was educated at Stonyhurst and Liverpool University. He became a barrister of the Middle Temple in 1903, and during the War served as a Captain in the Worcestershire Regiment in France. At the age of forty he became a Commoner at Magdalen and after taking his BA he was Lecturer in Jurisprudence at Wadham College and Tutor in Law at Magdalen 1919–21. He was a Fellow of Magdalen 1921–35. Lewis gives us this portrait of Robert Segar:

  ‘A squat, ugly, cheerful-looking little man, with a twinkle in his eye. He wears a bowler hat and carries a little brief-bag, which combine with his broad, vulgar face to give him the appearance of a prosperous and benevolent commercial traveller. He often chews the stump of a cigar.

  ‘He is a Papist and has settled his accounts with the other world: for the rest of his time he is free to play golf, eat his dinner, and crack his joke. He has been seen to hand a cigar to a beggar in the street with a quizzical expression. He takes the rough with the smooth, and laughs everything away: the humour is all in his face, and he might do well on the music hall stage. He brings about him the air of a bar parlour: to sit with him is to be snug and jolly and knowing and not unkindly, and to forget that there are green fields or art galleries in the world.