Janie King Moore died at the Restholme Nursing Home, Oxford, on 12 January 1951. She was buried in the churchyard of Holy Trinity Church, Headington Quarry, in the same grave as her friend Alice Hamilton Moore. ¹⁷

TO SARAH NEYIAN (W): TS

RER60/51.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

26th January 1951.

My dear Sarah

I am 100% with you about Rider Haggard. You know he wrote a sequel to She told by Holly, and called Ayesha; She and Alan, told by A. Quartermain: and Wisdom’s Daughter told by She herself.¹⁸ What comes out from reading all four is that She was (as Job assumed) a dreadful liar. A. Quartermain was the only man who wasn’t taken in by her. She is the best story of the four, though not the best written. A missionary told me that he had seen a little ruined Kxaal where the natives told him a white witch used to live who was called She-who-must-be-obeyed. Rider Haggard had no doubt heard this too, and that is the kernel of the story.

I also have just had ‘flu or I’d write more. Love to all.

Your affectionate Godfather,

C. S. Lewis

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (BOD):

Magdalen etc

31/1/51

My dear Arthur

Minto died a fortnight ago. Please pray for her soul.

Wd. it suit you if I arrived at your local inn on Sat. March 31st and left on Mon. April 16th? Can you let me know by return? And also if the inn cd. have me?¹⁹ If they’re fed up with my choppings & changings you can truly tell them that my circumstances are wholly changed. God bless you.

Yours

Jack

TO ROGER LANCELYN GREEN (BOD): ²⁰

Magdalen College

Oxford

31/1/51

My dear Roger

What two nights can you come to me? I prefer not a week end if you can possibly manage it. I suggest Feb 28 & 29th. (Feb 13, 20 & March 2nd no good). I miss you v. much. Love & duty to all of you.

Yours

Jack

TO MRS HALMBACHER(WHL):

Magdalen College,

January 1951

Dear Mrs Halmbacher

How very kind of you. This is absolutely the present I wanted, for the nuisance and waste of time of finding that one has’nt got an envelope at a critical moment is serious…

We are all chuckling over a certain West of England resort which is I’m told circulating the American tourist agencies to this effect–‘When you come to England come straight to—. We guarantee that we are taking absolutely no part in the Festival of Britain.’²¹

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):

Magdalen College

Oxford

7/2/51

Dear Mrs. Van Deusen

First, I must apologise for not having acknowledged Woodbridge on Nature.²² It arrived safely: many thanks. I have not read it yet but it is on the waiting list. (You will understand that I am never in the position of looking for a book to read, but nearly always looking for time in which to read books!)

If ‘planning’ is taken in the literal sense of thinking before one acts and acting on what one has thought out to the best of one’s ability, then of course planning is simply the traditional virtue of Prudence and not only compatible with, but demanded by, Christian ethics. But if the word is used (as I think you use it) to mean some particular politico-social programme, such as that of the present British Govt, then one cd. only say after examining that programme in detail. I don’t think I have studied it enough to do that. As for the ‘planning’ involved in your social work I am of course even less qualified.

It is certainly not wrong to try to remove the natural consequences of sin provided the means by which you remove them are not in themselves another sin. (E.g. it is merciful and Christian to remove the natural consequences of fornication by giving the girl a bed in a maternity ward and providing for the child’s keep and education, but wrong to remove them by abortion or infanticide). Perhaps the enclosed article (I don’t want it back) will make the point clearer.

Where benevolent planning, armed with political or economic power, can become wicked is when it tramples on people’s rights for the sake of their good.

Your letter gave me great pleasure: you are apparently on the right road. With all blessings.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

On 8 February 1951 there was a vote for the Professor of Poetry by the MAs of Oxford University. C. S. Lewis was running against Cecil Day-Lewis.²³ Warnie Lewis wrote in his diary that evening: ‘While we were waiting to dine at the Royal Oxford…came the bad news that [Jack] had been defeated by C. Day Lewis for the Poetry Chair, by 194 votes to 173.J took it astonishingly well, much better than his backers.’²⁴

TO SEYMOUR SPENCER (P): ²⁵

Magdalen etc.

28/2/51

Dear Doctor Spencer

Thanks v. much for the bit from Fromm.²⁶

I enclose an offprint (I don’t want it back) from the Australian Twentieth Century wh. I hope makes my point clear.²⁷ Quote directly or indirectly from this at pleasure. I look forward to seeing yr. paper in the Month and wd. be happy to read the typescript if you think I can be of any help.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO ‘MRS LOCKLEY (L): ²⁸

[Magdalen College]

5 March 1951

How right you are: the great thing is to stop thinking about happiness. Indeed the best thing about happiness itself is that it liberates you from thinking about happiness—as the greatest pleasure that money can give us is to make it unnecessary to think about money. And one sees why we have to be taught the ‘not thinking’ when we lack as well as when we have. And I’m sure that, as you say, you will ‘get through somehow in the end’.

Here is one of the fruits of unhappiness: that it forces us to think of life as something to go through. And out at the other end. If only we could steadfastly do that while we are happy, I suppose we shd. need no misfortunes. It is hard on God really. To how few of us He dare send happiness because He knows we will forget Him if He gave us any sort of nice things for the moment…

I do get that sudden feeling that the whole thing is hocus pocus and it now worries me hardly at all. Surely the mechanism is quite simple? Sceptical, incredulous, materialistic ruts have been deeply engraved in our thought, perhaps even in our physical brains by all our earlier lives. At the slightest jerk our thought will flow down those old ruts. And notice when the jerks come. Usually at the precise moment when we might receive Grace. And if you were a devil would you not give the jerk just at those moments? I think that all Christians have found that he is v. active near the altar or on the eve of conversion: worldly anxieties, physical discomforts, lascivious fancies, doubt, are often poured in at such junctures…But the Grace is not frustrated. One gets more by pressing steadily on through these interruptions than on occasions when all goes smoothly…

I am glad you all liked ‘The Lion’. A number of mothers, and still more, schoolmistresses, have decided that it is likely to frighten children, so it is not selling very well. But the real children like it, and I am astonished how some very young ones seem to understand it. I think it frightens some adults, but very few children…

TO ROGER IANCELYN GREEN (BOD):

6/3/51

My dear Roger

(Of course, yes: I thought I had asked you to do so). You are quite right about a wood fire.²⁹ Wood keeps on glowing red again in the places you have already extinguished—phoenix-like. Even the large webbed feet of a marsh-wiggle couldn’t do it. Yet it must be a flat hearth, I think. Does peat go out easily by treading? As an Irishman I ought to know, but don’t. I think it will have to [be] a coal fire on a flat hearth. After all, Underland might well use coal, whereas wood or charcoal wd. have to be imported.

I finished the Antigeos book.³⁰ There are two and only two, good ideas in it: the (supposed) ‘fog’ on the voyage and the great tidal waves on the Antigosian sea. All else is as dull as ditchwater: a flat, featureless, landscape and deadly municipal restaurants. The inhabitants are less interesting than any other-worlders I have yet met.

I enjoyed our biduum³¹ or pair-o’-days v. much. Love to both.

Yours

Jack

TO RUTH PITTER (BOD):

Magdalen College,

Oxford

17/3/51

Dear Miss Pitter

I hope you haven’t thought I was being such a brute beast as to obey your ‘Don’t write’. I was more innocently employed in having my third dose of influenza this year–or rather, now that I look at the date of your letter, it must have been my second and third, for the flash of daylight between the two tunnels was almost too short to notice.

The book is most beautiful,³² yet not with any fussy and intrusive beauty that reduces the poems to parts of a pattern. My old friends look better in their new site—for I’m no Manichean, and think the beautiful soul should have a beautiful body. But one reason why they look better is that they are better than I remembered. I find that my very favourite, The Sparrow’s Skull, had in memory preserved only its poignancy and lost a great deal of its delicacy and poetic breeding. More shame to me when it was on my shelves and memory—apparently a vulgarising memory—could have been corrected. I say, Sinking, which I hadn’t properly noticed before, is a corker. So indeed are dozens. It is a good time for re-reading: I have the precious vulnerability of the convalescent. Why do they call it ‘depression’? I like it.

The engraving is perfect except for (possibly) the Muses’ profile where I think the heavy, moustache-like shadow on the upper lip is a pity:³³ but probably not so in the original. Yes. I have good reason to remember your vine and ‘to consider it’ (as in this picture) ‘is to taste it spiritually’–so Traherne says in his Centuries of Meditations,³⁴ which I expect you know and am sure, if you know, you love.

When next term cd. you come down and lunch? There’s an extra reason: you have property to reclaim. Groping in the inn’ards of an old arm chair lately (a place which rivals the sea bed for lost treasure) I fished out a spectacle case which, being opened, revealed your golden name wrapped in your silver address. So come in May or June: preferably not a Tuesday. Let me know your ideas on this.

I’m off to Northern Ireland after Easter to try my native air—half frightened at the thought. Very many thanks for the book: it has given me great pleasure already.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):

Magdalen College

Oxford

17/3/51

Dear Mrs. Van Deusen

No. Unless it attracts you as an amusement I wouldn’t advise you to start attending ‘classes’. My idea is that unless one has to qualify oneself for a job (which you haven’t) the only sensible reason for studying anything is that one has a strong curiosity about it. And if one has, one can’t help studying it. I don’t see any point in attending lectures etc with some general notion of ‘self-improvement’–unless, as I say, one finds it fun.

I never see why we should do anything unless it is either a duty or a pleasure! Life’s short enough without filling up hours unnecessarily. And I think one usually learns more from a book than from a lecture.

With all good wishes.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO CHRISTIAN HARDIE (P): ³⁵

Magdalen etc

22/3/51

Dear Christian

Your commands have been obeyed.³⁶ About half way through, not having yet met a single scene or character that thoroughly engaged my interest, I nearly gave up: but perseverance was rewarded, for the second half is better. One forgives Julia quite a lot for her outburst on p 255 about Charles’s ‘damned bounderish way’.

Waugh is a writer, certainly. Many descriptions, phrases, and long-tailed similes pleased me: but not the novel, as a novel. If one’s going to tell the story through one of the characters then, surely, either that character ought to be a fairly sane and straightforward one (as in Erewhon³⁷ or Rob Roy),³⁸ or else, if he’s a monstrosity, then the other characters ought to be normal (as in Hogg’s Justified Sinner³⁹ or McKenna’s Well Meaning Woman).⁴⁰

As Chesterton said, you can have a story about a knight among dragons, but not about a dragon among dragons.⁴¹ Or, to come nearer, I can manage humans seen in a distorting mirror or goblins seen in an ordinary mirror: but goblins in a distorting mirror is too much. In spite of clear distinctions, the narrator is so very much ‘the same kind of thing’ as Blanche & Sebastian and his own father & Ld. M, and all the others—the tiresome seen through the eyes of the tiresome. And Sebastian would be a terrible bore on any terms. The narrator’s spontaneous dislike [of] all nice people (e.g. old Lady M. or Ld. Brideshead) has, I suppose, a theological significance?

But apart from all this—what, please, ought I now to know about the ‘contemporary scene’ after reading it? His picture of undergraduate life is, I suspect, much more characteristic of 1912 than of 1923: but for obvious reasons cd. not be really characteristic of any period. Not even characteristic within the circles he describes: for though I didn’t know them, I do know that if I did they wouldn’t look at all like that to me–any more than the circles I do know consist solely of Hoopers.⁴² Julia’s excellent remark about Mottram on p. 277 (‘He was a tiny bit of one’) seems to me true of all the characters except Julia herself. There isn’t one that is round and live like Levin⁴³ or the Rostovs,⁴⁴ or Archdeacon Grantly,⁴⁵ or Ld. Monmouth in Coningsby.⁴⁶ They’re more like people out of an Oscar Wilde melodrama, only without the epigrams.

Am I missing the point? Haunted by that fear I asked a man so young that W is to him an old master what he had got out of the book. He said ‘Oh, snob-value: it delighted the housemaid in me’ (i.e. he got out of it the same sort of pleasure my generation got out of Benson—I mean the Dodo one).⁴⁷ But that can’t be why you admire it. Nor can you think that ‘the contemporary scene’ is just what W describes: because after all we have independent access (worse luck!) to that scene. I’m puzzled.

You shall prescribe me a book to read every Lent: a kind of literary hair shirt.

You gave me a charming interlude on Tuesday—a bit of ‘contemporary scene’ quite omitted by W.!

Yours

Jack

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (BOD):

[The Kilns]

23/3/51

My dear Arthur

Naturally, without a Co. Down Ry.⁴⁸ time-table I can’t tell you what time I’d be at Helen’s Bay! But we shall find better uses for your petrol, and I’ll come by bus from Oxford St. I’m glad to know there’s a ‘regular’ service and am wondering whether it runs regularly every 5 minutes, every hour, once a week, or only a century.⁴⁹ No doubt I shall find out.

Looking forward!–yes, I can’t keep the feeling within bounds. I know now how a bottle of champagne feels while the wire is being taken off the cork.

Yours

Jack

Pop!!

TO DOUGLAS EDISON HARDING (P): ⁵⁰

Magdalen etc

Easter Day [25 March] 1951

Dear Mr. Harding

Hang it all, you’ve made me drunk, roaring drunk as I haven’t been on a book (I mean, a book of doctrine: imaginative works are another matter) since I first read Bergson during World War I.⁵¹ Who or what are you? How have you lived 40 years without my hearing of you before? Understand at once that my delight is not, alas!, so significant as it may seem, for I was never a scientist and have long ceased to be even the very minor philosopher I once was.

A great deal of your book is completely beyond me. My opinion is of no value. But my sensation is that you have written a work of the highest genius. It may not be—I mean, I can’t vouch that it is–philosophical genius. It may be only literary genius. The feeling I get is like a mix up of Pindar, Dante, & Patmore. (But can anything be so well written if it’s not good thought as well?). You follow the rocket course wh. you ascribe to Tellus.⁵² Paragraph after paragraph starts as if we were embarked for only the sort of Pantheistic uplift one gets in Emerson, but then swoops down and comes all clean & hard. But remember always, I don’t really understand: especially the crucial cap. 13 wh. is no easier than the Deduction of the Categories. (One difficulty is that my excitement makes me read it too quickly).

One criticism. Somebody is sure to answer the Missing Head gambit by saying that it wd. have no meaning for a blind man who knew the world and himself by palpation instead of vision.⁵³ My head is just as feelable (tho’ not as visible) as the rest of me. In other words, they’ll say, you have merely tripped over the fact that the eyes are in the Head. I’m sure this objection misses the real point: but had it not better be obviated, if only in a footnote?

England is disgraced if this book doesn’t get published: yet ordinary publishers will be so likely to send it to someone like Ryle to vet, and that will be fatal. Gollancz, Sheed, Faber, are possibles.

May I pass on my copy to Owen Barfield?–I must have someone to talk to about it.

When can we meet? Can you come over sometime next May or June and dine? (I can provide bed & breakfast)

I now feel that my illnesses etc are no excuse for my not having read it before. That this celestial bomb shd. have lain undetonated on my table all these months is a kind of allegory. Thanks to the Nth.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

P.S. On p. 97 (30b) Further, it was until recently often held…By whom? I thought the doctrine always was that of my eldila⁵⁴–‘He has no need at all for anything that is made⁵⁵…He has infinite use for all that is made.’

TO RUTH PITTER(BOD): TS

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

26th March 1951.

Dear Miss Pitter,

May I book May 10th: 1.15? The ferly in the engraving is not at all like a concrete mixer.⁵⁶

I did’nt know arm chairs were ever cleaned: should they be?⁵⁷

Yours ignorantly,

C. S. Lewis

TO GEORGE SAYER(W): TS

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

26th March 1951.

My dear George,

The time has come, the Walrus said, to talk of many things⁵⁸–but chiefly of when you next propose to take a bed in College. Any time you like after the 23rd of next month, Mondays excepted, and also excepting 8th and 15th May.

Pray, Sir, how does Moira do? And Cardinal Schwanda?⁵⁹ All well here except myself, who have a bad cold; but I’m off to Ireland I hope on Friday for a fortnight, which may shift it. (Warnie in his usual way of encouragement, reads me paragraphs from the paper at breakfast about liners wind bound in the Mersey and waves 61/2 feet high off the Irish coast.)

Yours

Jack

TO CHRISTIAN HARDIE (P):

[Magdalen]

27/3/51

Dear Christian

The difference isn’t exactly that I read a novel for the characters. It’s more that for me a novel, or any work of art, is primarily a Thing, an Object, enjoyed for its colour, proportions, atmosphere, its flavour—the Odyssey-ishness of the Odyssey⁶⁰ or the Learishness of K Lear: but never, never (here is the real difference) as a personal acquaintance with the author.

Of course it is not a question of where I like the characters in the sense of wishing to meet them in real life. In that sense I like Sebastian better than lulia (or dislike him less): but I ‘like’ lulia better as a character in the sense that I find her live & worth reading about, while I find him dull. What matters more than absolute liking or disliking is some degree of sympathy with the author’s revealed preferences. I didn’t think the mother & Brideshead ‘priggish & imperious’ & I didn’t think Ryder ‘a sane & ordinary chap!’ As to liking & disliking the ‘idea’ of twitch-on-the-thread, I’m not absolutely certain that I often have any experience I wd. call liking or disliking an idea.

My trouble is quite different: a twitch-on-the-thread conversion doesn’t seem to me to be capable of artistic presentation. When the old man crosses himself we are shown (and can only be shown) only the physical gesture. The difference between (a.) Grace (b.) Momentary sentiment (c.) Semi-conscious revival of a gesture learned in childhood, can’t appear. It can be in real life. But in art de non existentibus et non apparentibus eadem lex.⁶¹ In fact, we’re left to put in all the important part for ourselves. I know about the veil over Agamemnon’s face:⁶² but the success must have depended on the rest of the picture

As to whether ‘religious people should be good’ Nicholas⁶³ seemed to have sounder views than Waugh!

I await your next prescription with interest. We might even make it Advent instead of Lent!

I liked yr. friend extremely.

Yours

Jack

TO VERA MATHEWS (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

27/3/51

Dear Miss Mathews

I have just got your letter of the 22nd. containing the sad news of your father’s death. But, dear lady, I hope you and your mother are not really ‘trying to pretend it didn’t happen’. It does happen, happens to all of us, and I have no patience with the high minded people who make out that it ‘doesn’t matter’. It matters a great deal, and very solemnly. And for those who are left, the pain is not the whole thing. I feel v. strongly (and I am not alone in this) that some good comes from the dead to the living in the months or weeks after the death. I think I was much helped by my own father after his death: as if our Lord welcomed the newly dead with the gift of some power to bless those they have left behind; His birthday present. Certainly, they often seem just at that time, to be very near us. God bless you all and give you grace to receive all the good in this, as in every other event, is intended you.

My brother joins me in great thanks for all your kindnesses, and especially on behalf of dear little comical Victor Drewe—our barber, as you know.⁶⁴ When he cut my hair last week he spoke in the most charming way of his wife who has just been ill and (he said) ‘She looks so pretty, Sir, so pretty, but terribly frail.’ It made one want to laugh & cry at the same time—the lover’s speech, and the queer little pot-bellied, grey-headed, unfathomably respectable figure. You don’t misunderstand my wanting to laugh, do you? We shall, I hope, all enjoy one another’s funniness openly in a better world.

I have had flu’ three times but am better now and am going for a holiday on Friday. As to beef—it’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good: I expect the bulls enjoy roaming the Argentine plains & really like that better than being eaten in England!

Yrs. Sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO WARHELD M. FIROR(BOD):

Magdalen College,

Oxford

27/3/51

My dear Firor

Your letter came to cheer a rather grim day. I have never known a spring like this: the sun has hardly appeared since last October and this morning a thin mixture of rain & snow is falling. My own household is lucky because we have a wood, and therefore wood (what a valuable idiom) for fires: there is hardly any coal in England. The worst of a wood fire—delightful to eye and nose—is that it demands continual attention. But this is a trifle: many people have to spend most of their leisure at the cinema because it is the only warm place. (I hardly ever go myself. Do you? It seems to me an astonishingly ugly art. I don’t mean ‘ugly’ in any high flying moral or spiritual sense, but just disagreeable to the eye–crowded, unrestful, inharmonious)

There has been a great change in my life owing to the death of the old lady I called my mother. She died without apparent pain after many months of semi conscious existence, and it wd. be hypocritical to pretend that it was a grief to us.

Of your three rules I heartily agree with the first and the third. The second (‘keep rested’) sounds at first as if our obedience to it must v. often depend on many factors outside our control. I can think of some in whose ears it would sound like a cruel mockery. But I suspect that you have a reply. Do you mean that there is a kind of rest which ‘no man taketh from us’⁶⁵ and which can be preserved even in the life of a soldier on active service or of a woman who works behind a counter all day and then goes home to work and mend and wash? And no doubt there is: but it doesn’t always include rest for the legs.

‘His plan for the day’–yes, that is all important. And I keep losing sight of it: in days of leisure and happiness perhaps even more than in what we call ‘bad’ days.

The whole difficulty with me is to keep control of the mind and I wish one’s earliest education had given one more training in that. There seems to be a disproportion between the vastness of the soul in one respect (i.e. as a mass of ideas and emotions) and its smallness in another (i.e. as central, controlling ego). The whole inner weather changes so completely in less than a minute. Do you read George Herbert—

If what soul doth feel sometimes My soul might always feel—⁶⁶

He’s a good poet and one who helped to bring me back to the Faith.

My brother and all other ham-eating beneficiaries (shd. I call us Hamsters?) join me in good wishes. All blessings.

Yours ever

C. S. Lewis

TO MRS HALMBACHER(L):

[Magdalen College

March 1951]

The question for me (naturally) is not ‘Why should I not be a Roman Catholic?’ but ‘Why should I?’ But I don’t like discussing such matters, because it emphasises differences and endangers charity. By the time I had really explained my objection to certain doctrines which differentiate you from us (and also in my opinion from the Apostolic and even the Medieval Church), you would like me less.

TO SHELDON VANAUKEN (BOD):

17/4/51

Dear Van Auken

My prayers are answered. No: a glimpse is not a vision. But to a man on a mountain road by night, a glimpse of the next three feet of road may matter more than a vision of the horizon. And there must perhaps always be just enough lack of demonstrative certainty to make free choice possible: for what could we do but accept if the faith were like the multiplication table?

There will be a counter attack on you, you know, so don’t be too alarmed when it comes. The enemy will not see you vanish into God’s company without an effort to reclaim you. Be busy learning to pray and (if you have made up yr. mind on the denominational question) get confirmed.

Blessings on you and a hundred thousand welcomes. Make use of me in any way you please: and let us pray for each other always.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO R. W. CHAPMAN (BOD): ⁶⁷

Magdalen

17/4/51

Dear Chapman

Did I ever denigrate Horace? If so, I deserve to be struck blind like Stesichorus (was it?) for insulting Helen.⁶⁸ But I dare say I did: I wouldn’t now. The truth is I am just returning to him after a period of idolatrous admiration for him in boyhood and a long intervening alienation. The risus ab angulo stanza⁶⁹ alone is proof enough.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):

Magdalen College

Oxford

18/4/51

Dear Mrs. Van Deusen

Thanks for your letter of the 7th. I have just returned from a holiday and the time since has been spent in writing about 40 letters with my own hand: so much for Ivory Towers.

I also find your question v. difficult in my own life. What is right we usually know, or it is our own fault if we don’t: but what is prudent or sensible we often do not. Is it part of the scheme that we shd. ordinarily be left to make the best we can of our own v. limited and merely probable reasonings? I don’t know. Or wd. guidance even on these points be more largely given if we had early enough acquired the regular habit of seeking it?

How terrible your anxiety about your daughter must have been. She shall have her place in my prayers, such as they are.

Walsh didn’t know much about my private life.⁷⁰ Strictly between ourselves, I have lived most of it (that is now over) in a house wh. was hardly ever at peace for 24 hours, amidst senseless wranglings, lyings, backbitings, follies, and scares. I never went home without a feeling of terror as to what appalling situation might have developed in my absence. Only now that it is over (tho’ a different trouble has taken its place)⁷¹ do I begin to realise quite how bad it was.

God bless you all.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO SISTER MADELEVA CSC (W): ⁷²

Magdalen College,

Oxford

18/4/51

Dear Sister Madeleva

I don’t know whether I shd. thank you or your publishers for so kindly sending me a copy of your wholly delightful Lost Language.⁷³ At any rate I have to thank you for writing it. There has been nothing v. like it before and it emphasises a side of Chaucer too often neglected. I am glad you say a word on behalf of ‘conventions’ on p. 17. I always tell my pupils that a ‘convention’ appears to be such only when it has ended.

With all good wishes.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO MISS BRECKENRIDGE (I):

Magdalen etc

19 April 1951

I think that if God forgives us we must forgive ourselves. Otherwise it is almost like setting up ourselves as a higher tribunal than Him.

Many religious people, I’m told, have physical symptoms like the ‘prickles’ in the shoulder. But the best mystics set no value on that sort of thing, and do not set much on visions either. What they seek and get is, I believe, a kind of direct experience of God, immediate as a taste or colour. There is no reasoning in it, but many would say that it is an experience of the intellect—the reason resting in its enjoyment of its object…

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