Present Concerns: Journalistic Essays

INTRODUCTION

‘Who is Elizabeth Taylor?’ asked C. S. Lewis. He and I were talking about the difference between ‘prettiness’ and ‘beauty’, and I suggested that Miss Taylor was a great beauty. ‘If you read the newspapers,’ I said to Lewis, ‘you would know who she is.’ ‘Ah-h-h-h!’ said Lewis playfully, ‘but that is how I keep myself unspotted from the world.’ He recommended that if I absolutely ‘must’ read newspapers I have a frequent ‘mouthwash’ with The Lord of the Rings or some other great book.

As most of those familiar with Lewis’s writings will know, it was the ‘news’ in newspapers that Lewis thought ‘possibly the most phantasmal of all histories’. Several times he showed me the only newspaper I remember being delivered to his house on Sundays. It belonged to his gardener, Paxford, and when Lewis and I read the headlines on that paper we hoped to goodness the news in it was phantasmal. In any event, I haven’t bothered much with newspapers since the brief and immensely happy period when I was living in Lewis’s house. And I have tried to be faithful to his prescription regarding ‘mouthwashes’.

I do not want to give the impression that Lewis was a Pharisee. He did not condemn either those who wrote for newspapers or those who read them. Otherwise he would have had to censure himself as all but two of these essays were written for newspapers and magazines. Indeed, they provide us with the most complete picture we have of C. S. Lewis the Journalist. It was a role which suited Lewis admirably, for he possessed to an astonishing degree the gift of saying what needed to be said clearly and briefly. There is another thing which sets this book apart from his others. Most of his works are about Theology and Literature. While some of these pieces touch on those subjects, they were brought together because they are about so many other things. Their very variety helps answer the question ‘What else was Lewis concerned about?’

The title of this book was suggested by Jeremy Dyson, President of the Oxford University C. S. Lewis Society. Mr Dyson is much younger than I, and after reading some of these essays he found Lewis’s concerns very ‘present’ to him. However, in writing the footnotes for the book I began to wonder how ‘present’ Lewis’s concerns and interests would be to most people. How many readers have heard of Colonel Blimp? Almost everyone would have known who he was when ‘Blimpophobia’ was first published. In the end I found the answer very close by. I had never found out who Colonel Blimp was until I began editing the essays, but I had long known what Lewis meant by Blimpophobia. The truth is that while some of the outward clothing of the things Lewis wrote about has changed, the essentials in all these essays are as important as they always were. I shall be surprised if the essay ‘On Living in an Atomic Age’ is not of greater concern today than when it first appeared.

C. S. Lewis the Journalist would not be nearly so well represented were it not for the man who introduced me to ‘On Living in an Atomic Age’. He is Gordon Wright of Pye Bridge, Derbyshire, and he wrote to me after discovering ‘On Living in an Atomic Age’ and ‘Three Kinds of Men’ cut out of whatever journals they had appeared in and stuck into a copy of a book by Lewis. Mr Wright came to Oxford with these treasures—both new to me. It was not difficult to find the source of the first essay but ‘Three Kinds of Men’ seemed impossible to track down. However, by following various clues provided by the war-news on the back of the cutting I eventually traced it to The Sunday Times. I am deeply indebted to Gordon Wright for his generosity. As so often, I have benefited from the willingness of my friend Owen Barfield to go over my own work. Finally, I am grateful to all those publishers who have allowed me to reprint the essays which make up this collection.

‘The Necessity of Chivalry’ is Lewis’s title for the essay published as ‘Notes on the Way’ in Time and Tide, vol. XXI (17 August 1940), p. 841.

‘Equality’ is reprinted from The Spectator, vol. CLXXI (27 August 1943), p. 192.

‘Three Kinds of Men’ is reprinted from The Sunday Times, no. 6258 (21 March 1943), p. 2.

‘My First School’ was Lewis’s title for his ‘Notes on the Way’ from Time and Tide, vol. XXIV (4 September 1943), p. 717.

‘Is English Doomed?’ is from The Spectator, vol. CLXXII (11 February 1944), p. 121.

‘Democratic Education’ is Lewis’s title for his ‘Notes on the Way’ from Time and Tide, vol. XXV (29 April 1944), pp. 369–70.

‘A Dream’ is reprinted from The Spectator, vol. CLXXIII (28 July 1944), p. 77.

‘Blimpophobia’ is from Time and Tide, vol. XXV (9 September 1944), p. 785.

‘Private Bates’ is reprinted from The Spectator, vol. CLXXIII (29 December 1944), p. 596.

‘Hedonics’ comes from Time and Tide, vol. XXVI (16 June 1945), pp. 494–95.

‘After Priggery—What?’ is reprinted from The Spectator, vol. CLXXV (7 December 1945), p. 536.

‘Modern Man and His Categories of Thought’ is published here for the first time. It was written at the request of Bishop Stephen Neill (1899–1984) for the Study Department of the World Council of Churches. The essay exists only in typescript and it is dated October 1946. At that time Bishop Neill was Secretary of the Assembly Commission II, and the two movements, ‘Life and Work’ and ‘Faith and Order’, had come together to become what was formally constituted as The World Council of Churches in 1948.

‘Talking About Bicycles’ is reprinted from Resistance (October 1946), pp. 10–13.

‘On Living in an Atomic Age’ is taken from the last issue of the annual magazine Informed Reading, vol. VI [1948], pp. 78–84.

‘The Empty Universe’ is my title for Lewis’s Preface to D. E. Harding’s The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth: A New Diagram of Man in the Universe (London: Faber and Faber, 1952).

‘Prudery and Philology’ is reprinted from The Spectator, vol. CXCIV (21 January 1955), pp. 63–64.

‘Interim Report’ is reprinted from The Cambridge Review, vol. LXXVII (21 April 1956), pp. 468–71.

‘Is History Bunk?’ is also reprinted from The Cambridge Review, vol. LXXVIII (1 June 1957), pp. 647, 649.

‘Sex in Literature’ is reprinted from The Sunday Telegraph, no. 87 (30 September 1962), p. 8. Introducing the essay was this note from the publishers: ‘We are facing a crisis in morals, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the treatment by novelists of sex. Ought we not to recognise that literature, while we hope it may do good, in fact often does harm? Do not those modern novels that take—admittedly sometimes with high artistic motives—abnormal sexual behaviour for their theme, popularise and make fashionable and permissible the abnormal sexual behaviour of their characters? . . . We have invited Dr C. S. Lewis as a critic, a novelist, and a Christian apologist to give us his views on this matter, addressing himself to the further question of what in all this should be the attitude of the law. Here is his article.’

And here are eighteen other articles as well. I hope they will prove to be as tonic and pleasant a ‘mouthwash’ to others as they are to me.

Walter Hooper

8 January 1986

Oxford

I

THE NECESSITY OF CHIVALRY

The word chivalry has meant at different times a good many different things—from heavy cavalry to giving a woman a seat in a train. But if we want to understand chivalry as an ideal distinct from other ideals—if we want to isolate that particular conception of the man comme il faut which was the special contribution of the Middle Ages to our culture—we cannot do better than turn to the words addressed to the greatest of all the imaginary knights in Malory’s Morte d’Arthur. ‘Thou wert the meekest man’, says Sir Ector to the dead Launcelot. ‘Thou wert the meekest man that ever ate in hall among ladies; and thou wert the sternest knight to thy mortal foe that ever put spear in the rest.’1

The important thing about this ideal is, of course, the double demand it makes on human nature. The knight is a man of blood and iron, a man familiar with the sight of smashed faces and the ragged stumps of lopped-off limbs; he is also a demure, almost a maidenlike, guest in hall, a gentle, modest, unobtrusive man. He is not a compromise or happy mean between ferocity and meekness; he is fierce to the nth and meek to the nth. When Launcelot heard himself pronounced the best knight in the world, ‘he wept as he had been a child that had been beaten’.2

What, you may ask, is the relevance of this ideal to the modern world? It is terribly relevant. It may or may not be practicable—the Middle Ages notoriously failed to obey it—but it is certainly practical; practical as the fact that men in a desert must find water or die.

Let us be quite clear that the ideal is a paradox. Most of us, having grown up among the ruins of the chivalrous tradition, were taught in our youth