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Title: Surprised by Joy. The shape of my early life.
Author: Lewis, C. S. [Clive Staples] (1898-1963)
Date of first publication: 1955
Edition used as base for this ebook:London: Geoffrey Bles, 1955[first edition]
Date first posted: 4 October 2015
Date last updated: 16 October 2015
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1275

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The shape of my early life

by C. S. Lewis

Surprised by joy--impatient as the wind
WORDSWORTH

To DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS, O.S.B.

Preface

This book is written partly in answer to requests that I would tell howI passed from Atheism to Christianity and partly to correct one or twofalse notions that seem to have got about. How far the story matters toanyone but myself depends on the degree to which others have experiencedwhat I call "joy". If it is at all common, a more detailed treatment ofit than has (I believe) been attempted before may be of some use. I havebeen emboldened to write of it because I notice that a man seldommentions what he had supposed to be his most idiosyncratic sensationswithout receiving from at least one (often more) of those present thereply, "What! Have you felt that too? I always thought I was the onlyone."

The book aims at telling the story of my conversion and is not a generalautobiography, still less "Confessions" like those of St. Augustine orRousseau. This means in practice that it gets less like a generalautobiography as it goes on. In the earlier chapters the net has to bespread pretty wide in order that, when the explicitly spiritual crisisarrives, the reader may understand what sort of person my childhood andadolescence had made me. When the "build-up" is complete, I confinemyself strictly to business and omit everything (however important byordinary biographical standards) which seems, at that stage, irrelevant.I do not think there is much loss; I never read an autobiography inwhich the parts devoted to the earlier years were not far the mostinteresting.

Contents

I. The First Years

II. Concentration Camp

III. Mountbracken and Campbell

IV. I Broaden my Mind

V. Renaissance

VI. Bloodery

VII. Light and Shade

VIII. Release

IX. The Great Knock

X. Fortune's Smile

XI. Check

XII. Guns and Good Company

XIII. The New Look

XIV. Checkmate

XV. The Beginning

I. The First Years

Happy, but for so happy ill secured.
MILTON

I was born in the winter of 1898 at Belfast, the son of a solicitor andof a clergyman's daughter. My parents had only two children, both sons,and I was the younger by about three years. Two very different strainshad gone to our making. My father belonged to the first generation ofhis family that reached professional station. His grandfather had been aWelsh farmer; his father, a self-made man, had begun life as a workman,emigrated to Ireland, and ended as a partner in the firm of Macilwaineand Lewis, "Boiler-makers, Engineers, and Iron Ship Builders". My motherwas a Hamilton with many generations of clergymen, lawyers, sailors, andthe like behind her; on her mother's side, through the Warrens, theblood went back to a Norman knight whose bones lie at Battle Abbey. Thetwo families from which I spring were as different in temperament as inorigin. My father's people were true Welshmen, sentimental, passionate,and rhetorical, easily moved both to anger and to tenderness; men wholaughed and cried a great deal and who had not much of the talent forhappiness. The Hamiltons were a cooler race. Their minds were criticaland ironic and they had the talent for happiness in a high degree--wentstraight for it as experienced travellers go for the best seat in atrain. From my earliest years I was aware of the vivid contrast betweenmy mother's cheerful and tranquil affection and the ups and downs of myfather's emotional life, and this bred in me long before I was oldenough to give it a name a certain distrust or dislike of emotion assomething uncomfortable and embarrassing and even dangerous.

Both my parents, by the standards of that time and place, were bookishor "clever" people. My mother had been a promising mathematician in heryouth and a B.A. of Queen's College, Belfast, and before her death wasable to start me both in French and Latin. She was a voracious reader ofgood novels, and I think the Merediths and Tolstoys which I haveinherited were bought for her. My father's tastes were quite different.He was fond of oratory and had himself spoken on political platforms inEngland as a young man; if he had had independent means he wouldcertainly have aimed at a political career. In this, unless his sense ofhonour, which was fine to the point of being Quixotic, had made himunmanageable, he might well have succeeded, for he had many of the giftsonce needed by a Parliamentarian--a fine presence, a resonant voice,great quickness of mind, eloquence, and memory. Trollope's politicalnovels were very dear to him; in following the career of Phineas Finn hewas, as I now suppose, vicariously gratifying his own desires. He wasfond of poetry provided it had elements of rhetoric or pathos, or both;I think Othello was his favourite Shakespearian play. He greatlyenjoyed nearly all humorous authors, from Dickens to W. W. Jacobs, andwas himself, almost without rival, the best raconteur I have everheard; the best, that is, of his own type, the type that acts all thecharacters in turn with a free use of grimace, gesture, and pantomime.He was never happier than when closeted for an hour or so with one ortwo of my uncles exchanging "wheezes" (as anecdotes were oddly called inour family). What neither he nor my mother had the least taste for wasthat kind of literature to which my allegiance was given the moment Icould choose books for myself. Neither had ever listened for the hornsof elfland. There was no copy either of Keats or Shelley in the house,and the copy of Coleridge was never (to my knowledge) opened. If I am aromantic my parents bear no responsibility for it. Tennyson, indeed, myfather liked, but it was the Tennyson of In Memoriam and LocksleyHall. I never heard from him of the Lotus Eaters or the Morted'Arthur. My mother, I have been told, cared for no poetry at all.

In addition to good parents, good food, and a garden (which then seemedlarge) to play in, I began life with two other blessings. One was ournurse, Lizzie Endicott, in whom even the exacting memory of childhoodcan discover no flaw--nothing but kindness, gaiety, and good sense. Therewas no nonsense about "lady nurses" in those days. Through Lizzie westruck our roots into the peasantry of County Down. We were thus free oftwo very different social worlds. To this I owe my lifelong immunityfrom the false identification which some people make of refinement withvirtue. From before I can remember I had understood that certain jokescould be shared with Lizzie which were impossible in the drawing-room;and also that Lizzie was, as nearly as a human can be, simply good.

The other blessing was my brother. Though three years my senior, henever seemed to be an elder brother; we were allies, not to sayconfederates, from the first. Yet we were very different. Our earliestpictures (and I can remember no time when we were not incessantlydrawing) reveal it. His were of ships and trains and battles; mine, whennot imitated from his, were of what we both called "dressed animals"--theanthropomorphised beasts of nursery literature. His earliest story--as myelder he preceded me in the transition from drawing to writing--wascalled The Young Rajah. He had already made India "his country";Animal-Land was mine. I do not think any of the surviving drawings datefrom the first six years of my life which I am now describing, but Ihave plenty of them that cannot be much later. From them it appears tome that I had the better talent. From a very early age I could drawmovement--figures that looked as if they were really running orfighting--and the perspective is good. But nowhere, either in mybrother's work or my own, is there a single line drawn in obedience toan idea, however crude, of beauty. There is action, comedy, invention;but there is not even the germ of a feeling for design, and there is ashocking ignorance of natural form. Trees appear as balls of cotton woolstuck on posts, and there is nothing to show that either of us knew theshape of any leaf in the garden where we played almost daily. Thisabsence of beauty, now that I come to think of it, is characteristic ofour childhood. No picture on the walls of my father's house everattracted--and indeed none deserved--our attention. We never saw abeautiful building nor imagined that a building could be beautiful. Myearliest aesthetic experiences, if indeed they were aesthetic, were notof that kind; they were already incurably romantic, not formal. Once inthose very early days my brother brought into the nursery the lid of abiscuit tin which he had covered with moss and garnished with twigs andflowers so as to make it a toy garden or a toy forest. That was thefirst beauty I ever knew. What the real garden had failed to do, the toygarden did. It made me aware of nature--not, indeed, as a storehouse offorms and colours but as something cool, dewy, fresh, exuberant. I donot think the impression was very important at the moment, but it soonbecame important in memory. As long as I live my imagination of Paradisewill retain something of my brother's toy garden. And every day therewere what we called "the Green Hills"; that is, the low line of theCastlereagh Hills which we saw from the nursery windows. They were notvery far off but they were, to children, quite unattainable. They taughtme longing--Sehnsucht; made me for good or ill, and before I was sixyears old, a votary of the Blue Flower.

If aesthetic experiences were rare, religious experiences did not occurat all. Some people have got the impression from my books that I wasbrought up in strict and vivid Puritanism, but this is quite untrue. Iwas taught the usual things and made to say my prayers and in due timetaken to church. I naturally accepted what I was told but I cannotremember feeling much interest in it. My father, far from beingspecially Puritanical, was, by nineteenth-century and Church of Irelandstandards, rather "high", and his approach to religion, as toliterature, was at the opposite pole from what later became my own. Thecharm of tradition and the verbal beauty of Bible and Prayer Book (allof them for me late and acquired tastes) were his natural delight, andit would have been hard to find an equally intelligent man who cared solittle for metaphysics. Of my mother's religion I can say almost nothingfrom my own memory. My childhood, at all events, was not in the leastother-worldly. Except for the toy garden and the Green Hills it was noteven imaginative; it lives in my memory mainly as a period of humdrum,prosaic happiness and awakes none of the poignant nostalgia with which Ilook back on my much less happy boyhood. It is not settled happiness butmomentary joy that glorifies the past.

To this general happiness there was one exception. I remember nothingearlier than the terror of certain dreams. It is a very common troubleat that age, yet it still seems to me odd that petted and guardedchildhood should so often have in it a window opening on what is hardlyless than Hell. My bad dreams were of two kinds, those about spectresand those about insects. The second were, beyond comparison, the worse;to this day I would rather meet a ghost than a tarantula. And to thisday I could almost find it in my heart to rationalise and justify myphobia. As Owen Barfield once said to me, "The trouble about insects isthat they are like French locomotives--they have all the works on theoutside." The works--that is the trouble. Their angular limbs, theirjerky movements, their dry, metallic noises, all suggest either machinesthat have come to life or life degenerating into mechanism. You may addthat in the hive and the ant-hill we see fully realised the two thingsthat some of us most dread for our own species--the dominance of thefemale and the dominance of the collective. One fact about the historyof this phobia is perhaps worth recording. Much later, in my teens, fromreading Lubbock's Ants, Bees and Wasps, I developed for a short time agenuinely scientific interest in insects. Other studies soon crowded itout; but while my entomological period lasted my fear almost vanished,and I am inclined to think a real objective curiosity will usually havethis cleansing effect.

I am afraid the psychologists will not be content to explain my insectfears by what a simpler generation would diagnose as their cause--acertain detestable picture in one of my nursery books. In it a midgetchild, a sort of Tom Thumb, stood on a toadstool and was threatened frombelow by a stag-beetle very much larger than himself. This was badenough; but there is worse to come. The horns of the beetle were stripsof cardboard separate from the plate and working on a pivot. By moving adevilish contraption on the verso you could make them open and shutlike pincers: snip-snap--snip-snap--I can see it while I write. How awoman ordinarily so wise as my mother could have allowed thisabomination into the nursery is difficult to understand. Unless, indeed(for now a doubt assails me), unless that picture itself is a product ofnightmare. But I think not.

In 1905, my seventh year, the first great change in my life took place.We moved house. My father, growing, I suppose, in prosperity, decided toleave the semi-detached villa in which I had been born and build himselfa much larger house, further out into what was then the country. The"New House", as we continued for years to call it, was a large one evenby my present standards; to a child it seemed less like a house than acity. My father, who had more capacity for being cheated than any man Ihave ever known, was badly cheated by his builders; the drains werewrong, the chimneys were wrong, and there was a draught in every room.None of this, however, mattered to a child. To me, the important thingabout the move was that the background of my life became larger. The NewHouse is almost a major character in my story. I am a product of longcorridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstair indoor silences, attics exploredin solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and thenoise of wind under the tiles. Also, of endless books. My father boughtall the books he read and never got rid of any of them. There were booksin the study, books in the drawing-room, books in the cloakroom, books(two deep) in the great bookcase on the landing, books in a bedroom,books piled as high as my shoulder in the cistern attic, books of allkinds reflecting every transient stage of my parents' interests, booksreadable and unreadable, books suitable for a child and books mostemphatically not. Nothing was forbidden me. In the seemingly endlessrainy afternoons I took volume after volume from the shelves. I hadalways the same certainty of finding a book that was new to me as a manwho walks into a field has of finding a new blade of grass. Where allthese books had been before we came to the New House is a problem thatnever occurred to me until I began writing this paragraph. I have noidea of the answer.

Out of doors was "the view" for which, no doubt, the site hadprincipally been chosen. From our front door we looked down over widefields to Belfast Lough and across it to the long mountain line of theAntrim shore--Divis, Colin, Cave Hill. This was in the far-off days whenBritain was the world's carrier and the Lough was full of shipping; adelight to both us boys, but most to my brother. The sound of asteamer's horn at night still conjures up my whole boyhood. Behind thehouse, greener, lower, and nearer than the Antrim mountains, were theHolywood Hills, but it was not till much later that they won myattention. The north-western prospect was what mattered at first; theinterminable summer sunsets behind the blue ridges, and the rooks flyinghome. In these surroundings the blows of change began to fall.

First of all, my brother was packed off to an English boarding-schooland thus removed from my life for the greater part of every year. Iremember well the rapture of his homecomings for the holidays but haveno recollection of any corresponding anguish at his departures. His newlife made no difference to the relations between us. I, meanwhile, wasgoing on with my education at home; French and Latin from my mother andeverything else from an excellent governess, Annie Harper. I made rathera bugbear of this mild and modest little lady at the time, but all thatI can remember assures me that I was unjust. She was a Presbyterian; anda longish lecture which she once interpolated between sums and copies isthe first thing I can remember that brought the other world to my mindwith any sense of reality. But there were many things that I thoughtabout more. My real life--or what memory reports as my real life--wasincreasingly one of solitude. I had indeed plenty of people to talk to:my parents, my grandfather Lewis, prematurely old and deaf, who livedwith us; the maids; and a somewhat bibulous old gardener. I was, Ibelieve, an intolerable chatterbox. But solitude was nearly always at mycommand, somewhere in the garden or somewhere in the house. I had nowlearned both to read and to write; I had a dozen things to do.

What drove me to write was the extreme manual clumsiness from which Ihave always suffered. I attribute it to a physical defect which mybrother and I both inherit from our father; we have only one joint inthe thumb. The upper joint (that furthest from the nail) is visible, butit is a mere sham; we cannot bend it. But whatever the cause, naturelaid on me from birth an utter incapacity to make anything. With penciland pen I was handy enough, and I can still tie as good a bow as everlay on a man's collar; but with a tool or a bat or a gun, a sleeve-linkor a corkscrew, I have always been unteachable. It was this that forcedme to write. I longed to make things, ships, houses, engines. Manysheets of cardboard and pairs of scissors I spoiled, only to turn frommy hopeless failures in tears. As a last resource, as a pis aller, Iwas driven to write stories instead; little dreaming to what a world ofhappiness I was being admitted. You can do more with a castle in a storythan with the best cardboard castle that ever stood on a nursery table.

I soon staked out a claim to one of the attics and made it "my study".Pictures, of my own making or cut from the brightly coloured Christmasnumbers of magazines, were nailed on the walls. There I kept my pen andinkpot and writing books and paint-box; and there

What more felicity can fall to creature
Than to enjoy delight with liberty?

Here my first stories were written, and illustrated, with enormoussatisfaction. They were an attempt to combine my two chief literarypleasures--"dressed animals" and "knights-in-armour". As a result, Iwrote about chivalrous mice and rabbits who rode out in complete mail tokill not giants but cats. But already the mood of the systematiser wasstrong in me; the mood which led Trollope so endlessly to elaborate hisBarsetshire. The Animal-Land which came into action in the holidays whenmy brother was at home was a modern Animal-Land; it had to have trainsand steamships if it was to be a country shared with him. It followed,of course, that the medieval Animal-Land about which I wrote my storiesmust be the same country at an earlier period; and of course the twoperiods must be properly connected. This led me from romancing tohistoriography; I set about writing a full history of Animal-Land.Though more than one version of this instructive work is extant, I neversucceeded in bringing it down to modern times; centuries take a deal offilling when all the events have to come out of the historian's head.But there is one touch in the History that I still recall with somepride. The chivalric adventures which filled my stories were in italluded to very lightly and the reader was warned that they might be"only legends". Somehow--but heaven knows how--I realised even then that ahistorian should adopt a critical attitude towards epic material. Fromhistory it was only a step to geography. There was soon a map ofAnimal-Land--several maps, all tolerably consistent. Then Animal-Land hadto be geographically related to my brother's India, and Indiaconsequently lifted out of its place in the real world. We made it anisland, with its north coast running along the back of the Himalayas;between it and Animal-Land my brother rapidly invented the principalsteamship routes. Soon there was a whole world and a map of that worldwhich used every colour in my paint box. And those parts of that worldwhich we regarded as our own--Animal-Land and India--were increasinglypeopled with consistent characters.

Of the books that I read at this time very few have quite faded frommemory, but not all have retained my love. Conan Doyle's Sir Nigel,which first set my mind upon "knights in armour", I have never feltinclined to reread. Still less would I now read Mark Twain's Yankee atthe Court of King Arthur, which was then my only source for theArthurian story, blissfully read for the sake of the romantic elementsthat came through and with total disregard of the vulgar ridiculedirected against them. Much better than either of these was E. Nesbit'strilogy, Five Children and It, The Phoenix and the Wishing Carpet,and The Amulet. The last did most for me. It first opened my eyes toantiquity, the "dark backward and abysm of time". I can still re-read itwith delight. Gulliver in an unexpurgated and lavishly illustratededition was one of my favourites, and I pored endlessly over an almostcomplete set of old Punches which stood in my father's study. Tennielgratified my passion for "dressed animals" with his Russian Bear,British Lion, Egyptian Crocodile and the rest, while his slovenly andperfunctory treatment of vegetation confirmed my own deficiencies. Thencame the Beatrix Potter books, and here at last beauty.

It will be clear that at this time--at the age of six, seven, and eight--Iwas living almost entirely in my imagination; or at least that theimaginative experience of those years now seems to me more importantthan anything else. Thus I pass over a holiday in Normandy (of which,nevertheless, I retain very clear memories) as a thing of no account; ifit could be cut out of my past I should still be almost exactly the manI am. But imagination is a vague word and I must make some distinctions.It may mean the world of reverie, day-dream, wish-fulfilling fantasy. Ofthat I knew more than enough. I often pictured myself cutting a finefigure. But I must insist that this was a totally different activityfrom the invention of Animal-Land. Animal-Land was not (in that sense) afantasy at all. I was not one of the characters it contained. I was itscreator, not a candidate for admission to it. Invention is essentiallydifferent from reverie; if some fail to recognise the difference that isbecause they have not themselves experienced both. Anyone who has willunderstand me. In my day-dreams I was training myself to be a fool; inmapping and chronicling Animal-Land I was training myself to be anovelist. Note well, a novelist; not a poet. My invented world was full(for me) of interest, bustle, humour, and character; but there was nopoetry, even no romance, in it. It was almost astonishingly prosaic.[1]Thus if we use the word imagination in a third sense, and the highestsense of all, this invented world was not imaginative. But certain otherexperiences were, and I will now try to record them. The thing has beenmuch better done by Traherne and Wordsworth, but every man must tell hisown tale.

[Footnote 1]For readers of my children's books, the best way of putting thiswould be to say that Animal-Land had nothing whatever in common withNarnia except the anthropomorphic beasts. Animal-Land, by its wholequality, excluded the least hint of wonder.

The first is itself the memory of a memory. As I stood beside aflowering currant bush on a summer day there suddenly arose in mewithout warning, and as if from a depth not of years but of centuries,the memory of that earlier morning at the Old House when my brother hadbrought his toy garden into the nursery. It is difficult to find wordsstrong enough for the sensation which came over me; Milton's "enormousbliss" of Eden (giving the full, ancient meaning to "enormous") comessomewhere near it. It was a sensation, of course, of desire; but desirefor what? not, certainly, for a biscuit-tin filled with moss, nor even(though that came into it) for my own past. [Greek: Ioulian pothô][2]--and beforeI knew what I desired, the desire itself was gone,the whole glimpse withdrawn, the world turned commonplace again,or only stirred by a longing for the longing that had just ceased.It had taken only a moment of time; and in a certain sense everythingelse that had ever happened to me was insignificant in comparison.

[Footnote 2]Oh, I desire too much.

The second glimpse came through Squirrel Nutkin; through it only,though I loved all the Beatrix Potter books. But the rest of them weremerely entertaining; it administered the shock, it was a trouble. Ittroubled me with what I can only describe as the Idea of Autumn. Itsounds fantastic to say that one can be enamoured of a season, but thatis something like what happened; and, as before, the experience was oneof intense desire. And one went back to the book, not to gratify thedesire (that was impossible--how can one possess Autumn?) but tore-awake it. And in this experience also there was the same surprise andthe same sense of incalculable importance. It was something quitedifferent from ordinary life and even from ordinary pleasure; something,as they would now say, "in another dimension".

The third glimpse came through poetry. I had become fond of Longfellow'sSaga of King Olaf: fond of it in a casual, shallow way for its storyand its vigorous rhythms. But then, and quite different from suchpleasures, and like a voice from far more distant regions, there came amoment when I idly turned the pages of the book and found the unrhymedtranslation of Tegner's Drapa and read

I heard a voice that cried,
Balder the beautiful
Is dead, is dead----

I knew nothing about Balder; but instantly I was uplifted into hugeregions of northern sky, I desired with almost sickening intensitysomething never to be described (except that it is cold, spacious,severe, pale, and remote) and then, as in the other examples, foundmyself at the very same moment already falling out of that desire andwishing I were back in it.

The reader who finds these three episodes of no interest need read thisbook no further, for in a sense the central story of my life is aboutnothing else. For those who are still disposed to proceed I will onlyunderline the quality common to the three experiences; it is that of anunsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any othersatisfaction. I call it Joy, which is here a technical term and must besharply distinguished both from Happiness and from Pleasure. Joy (in mysense) has indeed one characteristic, and one only, in common with them;the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again. Apartfrom that, and considered only in its quality, it might almost equallywell be called a particular kind of unhappiness or grief. But then it isa kind we want. I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever, ifboth were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasures in the world.But then Joy is never in our power and pleasure often is.

I cannot be absolutely sure whether the things I have just been speakingof happened before or after the great loss which befell our family andto which I must now turn. There came a night when I was ill and cryingboth with headache and toothache and distressed because my mother didnot come to me. That was because she was ill too; and what was odd wasthat there were several doctors in her room, and voices and comings andgoings all over the house and doors shutting and opening. It seemed tolast for hours. And then my father, in tears, came into my room andbegan to try to convey to my terrified mind things it had neverconceived before. It was in fact cancer and followed the usual course;an operation (they operated in the patient's house in those days), anapparent convalescence, a return of the disease, increasing pain, anddeath. My father never fully recovered from this loss.

Children suffer not (I think) less than their elders, but differently.For us boys the real bereavement had happened before our mother died. Welost her gradually as she was gradually withdrawn from our life into thehands of nurses and delirium and morphia, and as our whole existencechanged into something alien and menacing, as the house became full ofstrange smells and midnight noises and sinister whispered conversations.This had two further results, one very evil and one very good. Itdivided us from our father as well as our mother. They say that a sharedsorrow draws people closer together; I can hardly believe that it oftenhas that effect when those who share it are of widely different ages. IfI may trust my own experience, the sight of adult misery and adultterror has an effect on children which is merely paralysing andalienating. Perhaps it was our fault. Perhaps if we had been betterchildren we might have lightened our father's sufferings at this time.We certainly did not. His nerves had never been of the steadiest and hisemotions had always been uncontrolled. Under the pressure of anxiety histemper became incalculable; he spoke wildly and acted unjustly. Thus bya peculiar cruelty of fate, during those months the unfortunate man, hadhe but known it, was really losing his sons as well as his wife. We werecoming, my brother and I, to rely more and more exclusively on eachother for all that made life bearable; to have confidence only in eachother. I expect that we (or at any rate I) were already learning to lieto him. Everything that had made the house a home had failed us;everything except one another. We drew daily closer together (that wasthe good result)--two frightened urchins huddled for warmth in a bleakworld.

Grief in childhood is complicated with many other miseries. I was takeninto the bedroom where my mother lay dead; as they said, "to see her",in reality, as I at once knew, "to see it". There was nothing that agrown-up would call disfigurement--except for that total disfigurementwhich is death itself. Grief was overwhelmed in terror. To this day I donot know what they mean when they call dead bodies beautiful. Theugliest man alive is an angel of beauty compared with the loveliest ofthe dead. Against all the subsequent paraphernalia of coffin, flowers,hearse, and funeral I reacted with horror. I even lectured one of myaunts on the absurdity of mourning clothes in a style which would haveseemed to most adults both heartless and precocious; but this was ourdear Aunt Annie, my maternal uncle's Canadian wife, a woman almost assensible and sunny as my mother herself. To my hatred for what I alreadyfelt to be all the fuss and flummery of the funeral I may perhaps tracesomething in me which I now recognise as a defect but which I have neverfully overcome--a distaste for all that is public, all that belongs tothe collective; a boorish inaptitude for formality.

My mother's death was the occasion of what some (but not I) might regardas my first religious experience. When her case was pronounced hopelessI remembered what I had been taught; that prayers offered in faith wouldbe granted. I accordingly set myself to produce by will-power a firmbelief that my prayers for her recovery would be successful; and, as Ithought, I achieved it. When nevertheless she died I shifted my groundand worked myself into a belief that there was to be a miracle. Theinteresting thing is that my disappointment produced no results beyonditself. The thing hadn't worked, but I was used to things not working,and I thought no more about it. I think the truth is that the beliefinto which I had hypnotised myself was itself too irreligious for itsfailure to cause any religious revolution. I had approached God, or myidea of God, without love, without awe, even without fear. He was, in mymental picture of this miracle, to appear neither as Saviour nor asJudge, but merely as a magician; and when He had done what was requiredof Him I supposed He would simply--well, go away. It never crossed mymind that the tremendous contact which I solicited should have anyconsequences beyond restoring the status quo. I imagine that a "faith"of this kind is often generated in children and that its disappointmentis of no religious importance; just as the things believed in, if theycould happen and be only as the child pictures them, would be of noreligious importance either.

With my mother's death all settled happiness, all that was tranquil andreliable, disappeared from my life. There was to be much fun, manypleasures, many stabs of Joy; but no more of the old security. It wassea and islands now; the great continent had sunk like Atlantis.

II. Concentration Camp

Arithmetic with Coloured Rods.
TIMES EDUCATIONAL SUPPLEMENT, Nov. 19, 1954

Clop-clop-clop-clop... we are in a four-wheeler rattling over theuneven squaresets of the Belfast streets through the damp twilight of aSeptember evening, 1908; my father, my brother, and I. I am going toschool for the first time. We are in low spirits. My brother, who hasmost reason to be so, for he alone knows what we are going to, shows hisfeelings least. He is already a veteran. I perhaps am buoyed up by alittle excitement, but very little. The most important fact at themoment is the horrible clothes I have been made to put on. Only thismorning--only two hours ago--I was running wild in shorts and blazer andsandshoes. Now I am choking and sweating, itching too, in thick darkstuff, throttled by an Eton collar, my feet already aching withunaccustomed boots. I am wearing knickerbockers that button at the knee.Every night for some forty weeks of every year and for many a year I amto see the red, smarting imprint of those buttons in my flesh when Iundress. Worst of all is the bowler-hat, apparently made of iron, whichgrasps my head. I have read of boys in the same predicament who welcomedsuch things as signs of growing up; I had no such feeling. Nothing in myexperience had ever suggested to me that it was nicer to be a schoolboythan a child or nicer to be a man than a schoolboy. My brother nevertalked much about school in the holidays. My father, whom I implicitlybelieved, represented adult life as one of incessant drudgery under thecontinual threat of financial ruin. In this he did not mean to deceiveus. Such was his temperament that when he exclaimed, as he frequentlydid, "There'll soon be nothing for it but the workhouse," he momentarilybelieved, or at least felt, what he said. I took it all literally andhad the gloomiest anticipation of adult life. In the meantime, theputting on of the school clothes was, I well knew, the assumption of aprison uniform.

We reach the quay and go on board the old "Fleetwood boat"; after somemiserable strolling about the deck my father bids us goodbye. He isdeeply moved; I, alas, am mainly embarrassed and self-conscious. When hehas gone ashore we almost, by comparison, cheer up. My brother begins toshow me over the ship and tell me about all the other shipping in sight.He is an experienced traveller and a complete man of the world. Acertain agreeable excitement steals over me. I like the reflected portand starboard lights on the oily water, the rattle of winches, the warmsmell from the engine-room skylight. We cast off. The black space widensbetween us and the quay; I feel the throb of screws underneath me. Soonwe are dropping down the Lough and there is a taste of salt on one'slips, and that cluster of lights astern, receding from us, is everythingI have known. Later, when we have gone to our bunks, it begins to blow.It is a rough night and my brother is sea-sick. I absurdly envy him thisaccomplishment. He is behaving as experienced travellers should. Bygreat efforts I succeed in vomiting; but it is a poor affair--I was, andam, an obstinately good sailor.

No Englishman will be able to understand my first impressions ofEngland. When we disembarked, I suppose at about six next morning (butit seemed to be midnight), I found myself in a world to which I reactedwith immediate hatred. The flats of Lancashire in the early morning arein reality a dismal sight; to me they were like the banks of Styx. Thestrange English accents with which I was surrounded seemed like thevoices of demons. But what was worst was the English landscape fromFleetwood to Euston. Even to my adult eye that main line still appearsto run through the dullest and most unfriendly strip in the island. Butto a child who had always lived near the sea and in sight of high ridgesit appeared as I suppose Russia might appear to an English boy. Theflatness! The interminableness! The miles and miles of featureless land,shutting one in from the sea, imprisoning, suffocating! Everything waswrong; wooden fences instead of stone walls and hedges, red brickfarmhouses instead of white cottages, the fields too big, haystacks thewrong shape. Well does the Kalevala say that in the stranger's housethe floor is full of knots. I have made up the quarrel since; but atthat moment I conceived a hatred for England which took many years toheal.

Our destination was the little town of--let us call it Belsen--inHertfordshire. "Green Hertfordshire", Lamb calls it; but it was notgreen to a boy bred in County Down. It was flat Hertfordshire, flintyHertfordshire, Hertfordshire of the yellow soil. There is the samedifference between the climate of Ireland and of England as between thatof England and the Continent. There was far more weather at Belsen thanI had ever met before; there I first knew bitter frost and stinging fog,sweltering heat and thunderstorms on the great scale. There, through thecurtainless dormitory windows, I first came to know the ghastly beautyof the full moon.

The school, as I first knew it, consisted of some eight or nine boardersand about as many day-boys. Organised games, except for endless roundersin the flinty playground, had long been moribund and were finallyabandoned not very long after my arrival. There was no bathing exceptone's weekly bath in the bathroom. I was already doing Latin exercises(as taught by my mother) when I went there in 1908, and I was stilldoing Latin exercises when I left there in 1910; I had never got insight of a Roman author. The only stimulating element in the teachingconsisted of a few well-used canes which hung on the green ironchimney-piece of the single schoolroom. The teaching staff consisted ofthe headmaster and proprietor (we called him Oldie), his grown-up son(Wee Wee), and an usher. The ushers succeeded one another with greatrapidity; one lasted for less than a week. Another was dismissed in thepresence of the boys, with a rider from Oldie to the effect that if hewere not in Holy Orders he would kick him downstairs. This curious scenetook place in the dormitory, though I cannot remember why. All theseushers (except the one who stayed less than a week) were obviously asmuch in awe of Oldie as we. But there came a time when there were nomore ushers, and Oldie's youngest daughter taught the junior pupils. Bythat time there were only five boarders, and Oldie finally gave up hisschool and sought a cure of souls. I was one of the last survivors, andleft the ship only when she went down under us.

Oldie lived in a solitude of power, like a sea-captain in the days ofsail. No man or woman in that house spoke to him as an equal. No oneexcept Wee Wee initiated conversation with him at all. At meal times weboys had a glimpse of his family life. His son sat on his right hand;they two had separate food. His wife and three grown-up daughters(silent), the usher (silent), and the boys (silent) munched theirinferior messes. His wife, though I think she never addressed Oldie, wasallowed to make something of a reply to him; the girls--three tragicfigures, dressed summer and winter in the same shabby black--never wentbeyond an almost whispered "Yes, Papa", or "No, Papa", on the rareoccasions when they were addressed. Few visitors entered the house.Beer, which Oldie and Wee Wee drank regularly at dinner, was offered tothe usher but he was expected to refuse; the one who accepted got hispint, but was taught his place by being asked a few moments later in avoice of thunderous irony, "Perhaps you would like a little more beer,Mr. N.?" Mr. N., a man of spirit, replied casually, "Well, thank you,Mr. C., I think I would." He was the one who did not stay till the endof his first week; and the rest of that day was a black one for us boys.

I myself was rather a pet or mascot of Oldie's--a position which I swearI never sought and of which the advantages were purely negative. Even mybrother was not one of his favourite victims. For he had his favouritevictims, boys who could do nothing right. I have known Oldie enter theschoolroom after breakfast, cast his eyes round, and remark, "Oh, thereyou are, Rees, you horrid boy. If I'm not too tired I shall give you agood drubbing this afternoon." He was not angry, nor was he joking. Hewas a big, bearded man with full lips like an Assyrian king on amonument, immensely strong, physically dirty. Everyone talks of sadismnowadays but I question whether his cruelty had any erotic element init. I half divined then, and seem to see clearly now, what all hiswhipping-boys had in common. They were the boys who fell below a certainsocial status, the boys with vulgar accents. Poor P.--dear, honest,hard-working, friendly, healthily pious P.--was flogged incessantly, Inow think, for one offence only; he was the son of a dentist. I haveseen Oldie make that child bend down at one end of the schoolroom andthen take a run of the room's length at each stroke; but P. was thetrained sufferer of countless thrashings and no sound escaped him until,towards the end of the torture, there came a noise quite unlike a humanutterance. That peculiar croaking or rattling cry, that, and the greyfaces of all the other boys, and their deathlike stillness, are amongthe memories I could willingly dispense with.[3]

[Footnote 3]This punishment was for a mistake in a geometrical proof.

The curious thing is that despite all this cruelty we did surprisinglylittle work. This may have been partly because the cruelty wasirrational and unpredictable; but it was partly because of the curiousmethods employed. Except at geometry (which he really liked) it might besaid that Oldie did not teach at all. He called his class up and askedquestions. When the replies were unsatisfactory he said in a low, calmvoice, "Bring me my cane. I see I shall need it." If a boy becameconfused Oldie flogged the desk, shouting in a crescendo,"Think--Think--THINK!!" Then, as the prelude to execution, he muttered,"Come out, come out, come out." When really angry he proceeded toantics; worming for wax in his ear with his little finger and babbling,"Aye, aye, aye, aye...". I have seen him leap up and dance round andround like a performing bear. Meanwhile, almost in whispers, Wee Wee orthe usher, or (later) Oldie's youngest daughter, was questioning usjuniors at another desk. "Lessons" of this sort did not take very long;what was to be done with the boys for the rest of the time? Oldie haddecided that they could, with least trouble to himself, be made to doarithmetic. Accordingly, when you entered school at nine o'clock youtook your slate and began doing sums. Presently you were called up to"say a lesson". When that was finished you went back to your place anddid more sums--and so forever. All the other arts and sciences thusappeared as islands (mostly rocky and dangerous islands)

Which like to rich and various gems inlaid
The unadorned bosom of the deep

--the deep being a shoreless ocean of arithmetic. At the end of themorning you had to say how many sums you had done; and it was not quitesafe to lie. But supervision was slack and very little assistance wasgiven. My brother--I have told you that he was already a man of theworld--soon found the proper solution. He announced every morning withperfect truth that he had done five sums; he did not add that they werethe same five every day. It would be interesting to know how manythousand times he did them.

I must restrain myself. I could continue to describe Oldie for manypages; some of the worst is unsaid. But perhaps it would be wicked, andit is certainly not obligatory, to do so. One good thing I can tell ofhim. Impelled by conscience, a boy once confessed to him an otherwiseundetectable lie. The ogre was touched; he only patted the terrifiedboy's back and said, "Always stick to the truth." I can also say thatthough he taught geometry cruelly, he taught it well. He forced us toreason, and I have been the better for those geometry lessons all mylife. For the rest, there is a possible explanation of his behaviourwhich renders it more forgivable. Years after, my brother met a man whohad grown up in the house next door to Oldie's school. That man and hisfamily, and (I think) the neighbours in general, believed Oldie to beinsane. Perhaps they were right. And if he had fairly recently becomeso, it would explain a thing which puzzles me. At that school as I knewit most boys learned nothing and no boy learned much. But Oldie couldboast an impressive record of scholarships in the past. His schoolcannot always have been the swindle it was in our time.

You may ask how our father came to send us there. Certainly not becausehe made a careless choice. The surviving correspondence shows that hehad considered many other schools before fixing on Oldie's; and I knowhim well enough to be sure that in such a matter he would never havebeen guided by his first thoughts (which would probably have been right)nor even by his twenty-first (which would at least have beenexplicable). Beyond doubt he would have prolonged deliberation till hishundred-and-first; and they would be infallibly and invincibly wrong.This is what always happens to the deliberations of a simple man whothinks he is a subtle one. Like Earle's Scepticke in Religion he "isalwayes too hard for himself". My father piqued himself on what hecalled "reading between the lines". The obvious meaning of any fact ordocument was always suspect: the true and inner meaning, invisible toall eyes except his own, was unconsciously created by the restlessfertility of his imagination. While he thought he was interpretingOldie's prospectus, he was really composing a school-story in his ownmind. And all this, I doubt not, with extreme conscientiousness and evensome anguish. It might, perhaps, have been expected that this story ofhis would presently be blown away by the real story which we had to tellafter we had gone to Belsen. But this did not happen. I believe itrarely happens. If the parents in each generation always or often knewwhat really goes on at their sons' schools, the history of educationwould be very different. At any rate, my brother and I certainly did notsucceed in impressing the truth on our father's mind. For one thing (andthis will become clearer in the sequel) he was a man not easilyinformed. His mind was too active to be an accurate receiver. What hethought he had heard was never exactly what you had said. We did noteven try very hard. Like other children, we had no standard ofcomparison; we supposed the miseries of Belsen to be the common andunavoidable miseries of all schools. Vanity helped to tie our tongues. Aboy home from school (especially during that first week when theholidays seem eternal) likes to cut a dash. He would rather representhis master as a buffoon than an ogre. He would hate to be thought acoward and a cry-baby, and he cannot paint the true picture of hisconcentration camp without admitting himself to have been for the lastthirteen weeks a pale, quivering, tear-stained, obsequious slave. We alllike showing scars received in battle; the wounds of the ergastulum,less. My father must not bear the blame for our wasted and miserableyears at Oldie's; and now, in Dante's words, "to treat of the good thatI found there".

First, I learned, if not friendship, at least gregariousness. There hadbeen bullying at the school when my brother first went there. I had mybrother's protection for my first few terms (after which he left to goto a school we may call Wyvern) but I doubt if it was necessary. Duringthose last declining years of the school we boarders were too few andtoo badly treated to do or suffer much in that way. Also, after acertain time, there were no new boys. We had our quarrels, which seemedserious enough at the time; but long before the end we had known oneanother too long and suffered too much together not to be, at the least,very old acquaintance. That, I think, is why Belsen did me, in the longrun, so little harm. Hardly any amount of oppression from above takesthe heart out of a boy like oppression from his fellows. We had manypleasant hours alone together, we five remaining boarders. Theabandonment of organised games, though a wretched preparation for thepublic school life to which most of us were destined, was at the time agreat blessing. We were sent out for walks alone on half holidays. Wedid not do much walking. We bought sweets in drowsy village shops andpottered about on the canal bank or sat at the brow of a railway cuttingwatching a tunnel-mouth for trains. Hertfordshire came to look lesshostile. Our talk was not bound down to the narrow interests whichsatisfy public school boys; we still had the curiosity of children. Ican even remember from those days what must have been the firstmetaphysical argument I ever took part in. We debated whether the futurewas like a line you can't see or like a line that is not yet drawn. Ihave forgotten which side I took though I know that I took it with greatzeal. And always there was what Chesterton calls "the slow maturing ofold jokes".

The reader will notice that school was thus coming to reflect a patternI had already encountered in my home life. At home, the bad times haddrawn my brother and me closer together; here, where the times werealways bad, the fear and hatred of Oldie had something the same effectupon us all. His school was in some ways very like Dr. Grimstone'sschool in Vice Versa; but unlike Dr. Grimstone's it contained noinformer. We stood foursquare against the common enemy. I suspect thatthis pattern, occurring twice and so early in my life, has undulybiassed my whole outlook. To this day the vision of the world whichcomes most naturally to me is one in which "we two" or "we few" (and ina sense "we happy few") stand together against something stronger andlarger. England's position in 1940 was to me no surprise; it was thesort of thing that I always expect. Hence while friendship has been byfar the chief source of my happiness, acquaintance or general societyhas always meant little to me, and I cannot quite understand why a manshould wish to know more people than he can make real friends of. Hence,too, a very defective, perhaps culpably defective, interest in largeimpersonal movements, causes and the like. The concern aroused in me bya battle (whether in story or in reality) is almost in an inverse ratioto the number of the combatants.

In another way too Oldie's school presently repeated my home experience.Oldie's wife died; and in term time. He reacted to bereavement bybecoming more violent than before; so much so that Wee Wee made a kindof apology for him to the boys. You will remember that I had alreadylearned to fear and hate emotion; here was a fresh reason to do so.

But I have not yet mentioned the most important thing that befell me atOldie's. There first I became an effective believer. As far as I know,the instrument was the church to which we were taken twice every Sunday.This was high "Anglo-Catholic". On the conscious level I reactedstrongly against its peculiarities--was I not an Ulster Protestant, andwere not these unfamiliar rituals an essential part of the hated Englishatmosphere? Unconsciously, I suspect, the candles and incense, thevestments and the hymns sung on our knees, may have had a considerable,and opposite, effect on me. But I do not think they were the importantthing. What really mattered was that I here heard the doctrines ofChristianity (as distinct from general "uplift") taught by men whoobviously believed them. As I had no scepticism, the effect was to bringto life what I would already have said that I believed. In thisexperience there was a great deal of fear. I do not think there was morethan was wholesome or even necessary; but if in my books I have spokentoo much of Hell, and if critics want a historical explanation of thefact, they must seek it not in the supposed Puritanism of my Ulsterchildhood but in the Anglo-Catholicism of the church at Belsen. I fearedfor my soul; especially on certain blazing moonlit nights in thatcurtainless dormitory--how the sound of other boys breathing in theirsleep comes back! The effect, so far as I can judge, was entirely good.I began seriously to pray and to read my Bible and to attempt to obey myconscience. Religion was among the subjects which we often discussed;discussed, if my memory serves me, in an entirely healthy and profitableway, with great gravity and without hysteria, and without theshamefacedness of older boys. How I went back from this beginning youshall hear later.

Intellectually, the time I spent at Oldie's was almost entirely wasted;if the school had not died, and if I had been left there two years more,it would probably have sealed my fate as a scholar for good. Geometryand some pages in West's English Grammar (but even those I think Ifound for myself) are the only items on the credit side. For the rest,all that rises out of the sea of arithmetic is a jungle of dates,battles, exports, imports and the like, forgotten as soon as learned andperfectly useless had they been remembered. There was also a greatdecline in my imaginative life. For many years Joy (as I have definedit) was not only absent but forgotten. My reading was now mainlyrubbish; but as there was no library at the school we must not makeOldie responsible for that. I read twaddling school-stories in TheCaptain. The pleasure here was, in the proper sense, merewish-fulfilment and fantasy; one enjoyed vicariously the triumphs of thehero. When the boy passes from nursery literature to school-stories heis going down, not up. Peter Rabbit pleases a disinterestedimagination, for the child does not want to be a rabbit, though he maylike pretending to be a rabbit as he may later like acting Hamlet; butthe story of the unpromising boy who became captain of the First Elevenexists precisely to feed his real ambitions. I also developed a greattaste for all the fiction I could get about the ancient world: QuoVadis, Darkness and Dawn, The Gladiators, Ben Hur. It might beexpected that this arose out of my new concern for my religion, but Ithink not. Early Christians came into many of these stories, but theywere not what I was after. I simply wanted sandals, temples, togas,slaves, emperors, galleys, amphitheatres; the attraction, as I now see,was erotic, and erotic in rather a morbid way. And they were mostly, asliterature, rather bad books. What has worn better, and what I took toat the same time, is the work of Rider Haggard; and also the"scientifiction" of H. G. Wells. The idea of other planets exercisedupon me then a peculiar, heady attraction, which was quite differentfrom any other of my literary interests. Most emphatically it was notthe romantic spell of Das Ferne. "Joy" (in my technical sense) neverdarted from Mars or the Moon. This was something coarser and stronger.The interest, when the fit was upon me, was ravenous, like a lust. Thisparticular coarse strength I have come to accept as a mark that theinterest which has it is psychological, not spiritual; behind such afierce tang there lurks, I suspect, a psychoanalytical explanation. Imay perhaps add that my own planetary romances have been not so much thegratification of that fierce curiosity as its exorcism. The exorcismworked by reconciling it with, or subjecting it to, the other, the moreelusive, and genuinely imaginative, impulse. That the ordinary interestin scientifiction is an affair for psychoanalysts is borne out by thefact that all who like it, like it thus ravenously, and equally by thefact that those who do not, are often nauseated by it. The repulsion ofthe one sort has the same coarse strength as the fascinated interest ofthe other and is equally a tell-tale.

So much for Oldie's; but the year was not all term. Life at a vileboarding-school is in this way a good preparation for the Christianlife, that it teaches one to five by hope. Even, in a sense, by faith;for at the beginning of each term, home and the holidays are so far offthat it is as hard to realise them as to realise heaven. They have thesame pitiful unreality when confronted with immediate horrors.To-morrow's geometry blots out the distant end of term as to-morrow'soperation may blot out the hope of Paradise. And yet, term after term,the unbelievable happened. Fantastical and astronomical figures like"This time six weeks" shrank into practicable figures like "This timenext week", and then "This time to-morrow", and the almost supernaturalbliss of the Last Day punctually appeared. It was a delight that almostdemanded to be stayed with flagons and comforted with apples; a delightthat tingled down the spine and troubled the belly and at moments wentnear to stopping the breath. Of course this had a terrible and equallyrelevant reverse side. In the first week of the holidays we mightacknowledge that term would come again--as a young man, in peace time, infull health, acknowledges that he will one day die. But like him wecould not even by the grimmest memento mori be brought to realise it.And there too, each time, the unbelievable happened. The grinning skullfinally peered through all disguises; the last hour, held at bay byevery device our will and imaginations knew, came in the end, and oncemore it was the bowler-hat, the Eton collar, the knickerbockers, and(clop-clop-clop-clop) the evening drive to the quay. In all seriousnessI think that the life of faith is easier to me because of thesememories. To think, in sunny and confident times, that I shall die androt, or to think that one day all this universe will slip away andbecome memory (as Oldie slipped away into memory three times a year, andwith him the canes and the disgusting food, the stinking sanitation andthe cold beds)--this is easier to us if we have seen just that sort ofthing happening before. We have learned not to take present things attheir face value.

In attempting to give an account of our home life at this time I amtroubled by doubts about chronology. School affairs can to some extentbe dated by surviving records, but the slow, continuous unfolding offamily life escapes them. Our slight alienation from our fatherimperceptibly increased. In part no one was to blame; in a very greatpart we were to blame. A temperamental widower, still prostrated by theloss of his wife, must be a very good and wise man indeed if he makes nomistakes in bringing up two noisy and mischievous schoolboys who reservetheir confidence wholly for each other. And my father's good qualitiesas well as his weaknesses incapacitated him for the task. He was far toomanly and generous to strike a child for the gratification of his anger;and he was too impulsive ever to punish a child in cold blood and onprinciple. He therefore relied wholly on his tongue as the instrument ofdomestic discipline. And here that fatal bent towards dramatisation andrhetoric (I speak of it the more freely since I inherit it) produced apathetic yet comic result. When he opened his mouth to reprove us he nodoubt intended a short well-chosen appeal to our common sense andconscience. But alas, he had been a public speaker long before he becamea father. He had for many years been a public prosecutor. Words came tohim and intoxicated him as they came. What actually happened was that asmall boy who had walked on damp grass in his slippers or left abathroom in a pickle found himself attacked with something like Ciceroon Catiline, or Burke on Warren Hastings; simile piled on simile,rhetorical question on rhetorical question, the flash of an orator's eyeand the thundercloud of an orator's brow, the gestures, the cadences andthe pauses. The pauses might be the chief danger. One was so long thatmy brother, quite innocently supposing the denunciation to have ended,humbly took up his book and resumed his reading; a gesture which myfather (who had after all only made a rhetorical miscalculation of abouta second and a half) not unnaturally took for "cool, premeditatedinsolence". The ludicrous disproportion between such harangues and theiroccasions puts me in mind of the advocate in Martial who thunders aboutall the villains of Roman history while meantime lis est de tribuscapellis--

This case, I beg the court to note,
Concerns a trespass by a goat.

My poor father, while he spoke, forgot not only the offence, but thecapacities, of his audience. All the resources of his immense vocabularywere poured forth. I can still remember such words as "abominable","sophisticated" and "surreptitious". You will not get the full flavourunless you know an angry Irishman's energy in explosive consonants andthe rich growl of his R's. A worse treatment could hardly have beenapplied. Up to a certain age these invectives filled me with boundlessterror and dismay. From the wilderness of the adjectives and the welterof the unintelligible, emerged ideas which I thought I understood onlytoo well, as I heard with implicit and literal belief that our Father'sruin was approaching, that we should all soon beg our bread in thestreets, that he would shut up the house and keep us at school all theyear round, that we should be sent to the colonies and there end inmisery the career of crime on which we had, it seemed, already embarked.All security seemed to be taken from me; there was no solid groundbeneath my feet. It is significant that at this time if I woke in thenight and did not immediately hear my brother's breathing from theneighbouring bed, I often suspected that my father and he had secretlyrisen while I slept and gone off to America--that I was finallyabandoned. Such was the effect of my father's rhetoric up to a certainage; then, quite suddenly, it became ridiculous. I can even remember themoment of the change, and the story well illustrates both the justice ofmy father's anger and the unhappy way in which he expressed it. One daymy brother decided it would be a good thing to make a tent. Accordinglywe procured a dust-sheet from one of the attics. The next step was tofind uprights; the step-ladder in the wash-house suggested itself. For aboy with a hatchet it was the work of a moment to reduce this to anumber of disconnected poles. Four of these were then planted in theearth and the sheet draped over them. To make sure that the wholestructure was really reliable my brother then tried sitting on the topof it. We remembered to put away the ragged remains of the sheet butquite forgot about the uprights. That evening, when my father had comehome from work and dined, he went for a stroll in the garden,accompanied by us. The sight of four slender wooden posts rising fromthe grass moved in him a pardonable curiosity. Interrogation followed;on this occasion we told the truth. Then the lightnings flashed and thethunder roared; and all would have gone now as it had gone on a dozenprevious occasions, but for the climax--"Instead of which I find you havecut up the step-ladder. And what for, forsooth? To make a thing like anabortive Punch-and-Judy show." At that moment we both hid our faces;not, alas, to cry.

As will be seen from this anecdote one dominant factor in our life athome was the daily absence of our father from about nine in the morningtill six at night. For the rest of the day we had the house toourselves, except for the cook and housemaid with whom we were sometimesat war and sometimes in alliance. Everything invited us to develop alife that had no connection with our father. The most important of ouractivities was the endless drama of Animal-Land and India, and this ofitself isolated us from him.

But I must not leave the reader under the impression that all the happyhours of the holidays occurred during our father's absence. Histemperament was mercurial, his spirits rose as easily as they fell, andhis forgiveness was as thorough-going as his displeasure. He was oftenthe most jovial and companionable of parents. He could "play the fool"as well as any of us, and had no regard for his own dignity, "conned nostate". I could not, of course, at that age see what good company (byadult standards) he was, his humour being of the sort that requires atleast some knowledge of life for its full appreciation; I merely baskedin it as in fine weather. And all the time there was the sensuousdelight of being at home, the delight of luxury--"civilisation", as wecalled it. I spoke just now of Vice Versa. Its popularity was surelydue to something more than farce. It is the only truthful school storyin existence. The machinery of the Garuda Stone really serves to bringout in their true colours (which would otherwise seem exaggerated) thesensations which every boy had on passing from the warmth and softnessand dignity of his home life to the privations, the raw and sordidugliness, of school. I say "had" not "has"; for perhaps homes have gonedown in the world and schools gone up since then.

It will be asked whether we had no friends, no neighbours, no relatives.We had. To one family in particular our debt is so great that it hadbetter be left, with some other matters, to the next chapter.

III. Mountbracken and Campbell

For all these fair people in hall were in their first age; nonehappier under the heaven; their king, the man of noblest temper.It would be a hard task to-day to find so brave a fellowship inany castle.
GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT

To speak of my nearer relatives is to remind myself how the contrast ofLewis and Hamilton dominated my whole early life. It began, for me, withthe grandparents. Grandfather Lewis, deaf, slow-moving, humming hispsalm chants, much concerned for his health and prone to remind thefamily that he would not be with them long, is contrasted withGrandmother Hamilton, the sharp-tongued, sharp-witted widow, full ofheterodox opinions (even, to the scandal of the whole connection, a HomeRuler), every inch a Warren, indifferent to convention as only an oldSouthern Irish aristocrat could be, living alone in a large tumble-downhouse with half a hundred cats for company. To how many an innocentconversational gambit did she reply, "You're talking great nonsense"?Born a little later, she would, I think, have been a Fabian. She metvague small talk with ruthless statements of ascertainable fact andwell-worn maxims with a tart demand for evidence. Naturally, peoplecalled her eccentric. Coming down a generation I find the sameopposition. My father's elder brother "Uncle Joe", with his family oftwo boys and three girls, lived very close to us while we were at theOld House. His younger son was my earliest friend, but we drifted apartas we grew older. Uncle Joe was both a clever man and a kind, andespecially fond of me. But I remember nothing that was said by ourelders in that house; it was simply "grown up" conversation--aboutpeople, business, politics, and health, I suppose. But "Uncle Gussie"--mymother's brother, A. W. Hamilton--talked to me as if we were of an age.That is, he talked about Things. He told me all the science I could thentake in, clearly, eagerly, without silly jokes and condescensions,obviously liking it as much as I did. He thus provided the intellectualbackground for my reading of H. G. Wells. I do not suppose he cared forme as a person half so much as Uncle Joe did; and that (call it aninjustice or not) was what I liked. During these talks our attention wasfixed not on one another but on the subject. His Canadian wife I havealready mentioned. In her also I found what I liked best--an unfailing,kindly welcome without a hint of sentimentality, unruffled good sense,the unobtrusive talent for making all things at all times as cheerfuland comfortable as circ*mstances allowed. What one could not have onedid without and made the best of it. The tendency of the Lewises tore-open wounds and to rouse sleeping dogs was unknown to her as to herhusband.

But we had other kin who mattered to us far more than our aunts anduncles. Less than a mile from our home stood the largest house I thenknew, which I will here call Mountbracken, and there lived Sir W. E.Lady E. was my mother's first cousin and perhaps my mother's dearestfriend, and it was no doubt for my mother's sake that she took uponherself the heroic work of civilising my brother and me. We had astanding invitation to lunch at Mountbracken whenever we were at home;to this, almost entirely, we owe it that we did not grow up savages. Thedebt is not only to Lady E. ("Cousin Mary") but to her whole family;walks, motor-drives (in those days an exciting novelty), picnics, andinvitations to the theatre were showered on us, year after year, with akindness which our rawness, our noise, and our unpunctuality neverseemed to weary. We were at home there almost as much as in our ownhouse, but with this great difference, that a certain standard ofmanners had to be kept up. Whatever I know (it is not much) of courtesyand savoir faire I learned at Mountbracken.

Sir W. ("Cousin Quartus") was the eldest of several brothers who ownedbetween them one of the most important industrial concerns in Belfast.He belonged in fact to just that class and generation of which themodern man gets his impressions through Galsworthy's Forsytes. UnlessCousin Quartus was very untrue to type (as he may well have been) thatimpression is grossly unjust. No one less like a Galsworthian characterever existed. He was gracious, childlike, deeply and religiously humble,and abounding in charity. No man could feel more fully hisresponsibility to dependants. He had a good deal of boyish gaiety abouthim; at the same time I always felt that the conception of dutydominated his life. His stately figure, his grey beard, and hisstrikingly handsome profile make up one of the most venerable images inmy memory. Physical beauty was indeed common to most of the family.Cousin Mary was the very type of the beautiful old lady, with her silverhair and her sweet Southern Irish voice; foreigners must be warned thatthis resembles what they call a "brogue" about as little as the speechof a Highland gentleman resembles the jargon of the Glasgow slums. Butit was the three daughters whom we knew best. All three were "grown up"but in fact much nearer to us in age than any other grown-ups we knew,and all three were strikingly handsome. H., the eldest and the gravest,was a Juno, a dark queen who at certain moments looked like a Jewess. K.was more like a Valkyrie (though all, I think, were good horse-women)with her father's profile. There was in her face something of thedelicate fierceness of a thoroughbred horse, an indignant fineness ofnostril, the possibility of an excellent disdain. She had what thevanity of my own sex calls a "masculine" honesty; no man ever was atruer friend. As for the youngest, G., I can only say that she was themost beautiful woman I have ever seen, perfect in shape and colour andvoice and every movement--but who can describe beauty? The reader maysmile at this as the far-off echo of a precocious calf-love, but he willbe wrong. There are beauties so unambiguous that they need no lens ofthat kind to reveal them; they are visible even to the careless andobjective eyes of a child. (The first woman who ever spoke to my bloodwas a dancing mistress at a school that will come in a later chapter.)

In some ways Mountbracken was like our Father's house. There too wefound the attics, the indoor silences, the endless bookshelves. In theearly days, when we were still only a quarter tamed, we often neglectedour hostesses and rummaged on our own; it was there that I foundLubbock's Ants, Bees and Wasps. But it was also very different. Lifethere was more spacious and considered than with us, glided like a bargewhere ours bumped like a cart.

Friends of our own age--boy and girl friends--we had none. In part this isa natural result of boarding school; children grow up strangers to theirnext-door neighbours. But much more it was the result of our ownobstinate choice. One boy who lived near us attempted every now and thento get to know us. We avoided him by every means in our power. Our liveswere already full, and the holidays too short for all the reading,writing, playing, cycling, and talking that we wanted to get through. Weresented the appearance of any third party as an infuriatinginterruption. We resented even more bitterly all attempts (excepting thegreat and successful attempt made by Mountbracken) to show ushospitality. At the period that I am now speaking of this had not yetbecome a serious nuisance, but as it became gradually and steadily moreserious throughout our schooldays I may be allowed to say a word aboutit here and to get the subject out of our way. It was the custom of theneighbourhood to give parties which were really dances for adults but towhich, none the less, mere schoolboys and schoolgirls were asked. Onesees the advantages of this arrangement from the hostess's point ofview; and when the junior guests know each other well and are free fromself-consciousness perhaps they enjoy themselves. To me these danceswere a torment--of which ordinary shyness made only a part. It was thefalse position (which I was well able to realise) that tormented me; toknow that one was regarded as a child and yet be forced to take part inan essentially grown-up function, to feel that all the adults presentwere being half-mockingly kind and pretending to treat you as what youwere not. Add to this the discomfort of one's Eton suit and stiff shirt,the aching feet and burning head, and the mere weariness of being keptup so many hours after one's usual bedtime. Even adults, I fancy, wouldnot find an evening party very endurable without the attraction of sexand the attraction of alcohol; and how a small boy who can neither flirtnor drink should be expected to enjoy prancing about on a polished floortill the small hours of the morning, is beyond my conception. I had ofcourse no notion of the social nexus. I never realised that certainpeople were in civility obliged to ask me because they knew my father orhad known my mother. To me it was all inexplicable, unprovokedpersecution; and when, as often happened, such engagements fell in thelast week of the holidays and wrested from us a huge cantle of hours inwhich every minute was worth gold, I positively felt that I could havetorn my hostess limb from limb. Why should she thus pester me? I hadnever done her any harm, never asked her to a party.

My discomforts were aggravated by the totally unnatural behaviour whichI thought it my duty to adopt at a dance; and that had come about in asufficiently amusing way. Reading much and mixing little with childrenof my own age, I had, before I went to school, developed a vocabularywhich must (I now see) have sounded very funny from the lips of a chubbyurchin in an Eton jacket. When I brought out my "long words" adults notunnaturally thought I was showing off. In this they were quite mistaken.I used the only words I knew. The position was indeed the exact reverseof what they supposed; my pride would have been gratified by using suchschoolboy slang as I possessed, not at all by using the bookish languagewhich (inevitably in my circ*mstances) came naturally to my tongue. Andthere were not lacking adults who would egg me on with feigned interestand feigned seriousness--on and on till the moment at which I suddenlyknew I was being laughed at. Then, of course, my mortification wasintense; and after one or two such experiences I made it a rigid rulethat at "social functions" (as I secretly called them) I must never onany account speak of any subject in which I felt the slightest interestnor in any words that naturally occurred to me. And I kept my rule onlytoo well; a giggling and gurgling imitation of the vapidest grown-upchatter, a deliberate concealment of all that I really thought and feltunder a sort of feeble jocularity and enthusiasm, was henceforth myparty manner, assumed as consciously as an actor assumes his role,sustained with unspeakable weariness, and dropped with a groan of reliefthe moment my brother and I at last tumbled into our cab and the drivehome (the only pleasure of the evening) began. It took me years to makethe discovery that any real human intercourse could take place at amixed assembly of people in their good clothes.

I am here struck by the curious mixture of justice and injustice in ourlives. We are blamed for our real faults but usually not on the rightoccasions. I was, no doubt, and was blamed for being, a conceited boy;but the blame was usually attached to something in which no conceit waspresent. Adults often accuse a child of vanity without pausing todiscover on what points children in general, or that child inparticular, are likely to be vain. Thus it was for years a completemystery to me that my father should stigmatise as "affectation" mycomplaints about the itching and tickling of new underclothes. I see itall now; he had in mind a social legend associating delicacy of skinwith refinement and supposed that I was claiming to be unusuallyrefined. In reality I was in simple ignorance of that social legend, andif vanity had come into the matter would have been much prouder ofhaving a skin like a sailor. I was being accused of an offence which Ilacked resources to commit. I was on another occasion called "affected"for asking what "stirabout" was. It is, in fact, a "low" Irish word forporridge. To certain adults it seems obvious that he who claims not toknow the Low must be pretending to be High. Yet the real reason why Iasked was that I had never happened to hear the word; had I done so Ishould have piqued myself on using it.

Oldie's school, you will remember, sank unlamented in summer 1910; newarrangements had to be made for my education. My father now hit upon aplan which filled me with delight. About a mile from the New House rosethe large red-brick walls and towers of Campbell College, which had beenfounded for the express purpose of giving Ulster boys all the advantagesof a public school education without the trouble of crossing the IrishSea. My clever cousin, Uncle Joe's boy, was already there and doingwell. It was decided that I should go as a boarder, but I could get anexeat to come home every Sunday. I was enchanted. I did not believethat anything Irish, even a school, could be bad; certainly not so badas all I yet knew of England. To "Campbell" I accordingly went.

I was at this school for so short a time that I shall attempt nocriticism of it. It was very unlike any English public school that Ihave ever heard of. It had indeed prefects, but the prefects were of noimportance. It was nominally divided into "houses" on the Englishpattern, but they were mere legal fictions; except for purposes of games(which were not compulsory) no one took any notice of them. Thepopulation was socially much more "mixed" than at most English schools;I rubbed shoulders there with farmers' sons. The boy I most nearly madea friend of was the son of a tradesman who had recently been going therounds with his father's van because the driver was illiterate and couldnot keep "the books". I much envied him this pleasant occupation, andhe, poor fellow, looked back on it as a golden age. "This time lastmonth, Lewis," he used to say, "I wouldn't have been going in toPreparation. I'd have been coming home from my rounds and a wee teaclothlaid for me at one end of the table and sausages to my tea."

I am always glad, as a historian, to have known Campbell, for I think itwas very much what the great English schools had been before Arnold.There were real fights at Campbell, with seconds, and (I think) betting,and a hundred or more roaring spectators. There was bullying, too,though no serious share of it came my way, and there was no trace of therigid hierarchy which governs a modern English school; every boy heldjust the place which his fists and mother-wit could win for him. From mypoint of view the great drawback was that one had, so to speak, no home.Only a few very senior boys had studies. The rest of us, except whenseated at table for meals or in a huge "preparation room" for evening"Prep", belonged nowhere. In out-of-school hours one spent one's timeeither evading or conforming to all those inexplicable movements which acrowd exhibits as it thins here and thickens there, now slackens itspace and now sets like a tide in one particular direction, now seemsabout to disperse and then clots again. The bare brick passages echoedto a continual tramp of feet, punctuated with cat-calls, scrimmages,gusty laughter. One was always "moving on" or "hanging about"--inlavatories, in store rooms, in the great hall. It was very like livingpermanently in a large railway station.

The bullying had this negative merit that it was honest bullying; notbullying conscience-salved and authorised in the maison tolérée of theprefectorial system. It was done mainly by gangs; parties of eight orten boys each who scoured those interminable corridors for prey. Theirsorties, though like a whirlwind, were not perceived by the victim tilltoo late; the general, endless confusion and clamour, I suppose, maskedthem. Sometimes capture involved serious consequences; two boys whom Iknew were carried off and flogged in some backwater--flogged in the mostdisinterested fashion, for their captors had no personal acquaintancewith them; art for art's sake. But on the only occasion when I wascaught myself my fate was much milder and perhaps odd enough to be worthrecording. When I had come to myself after being dragged at headlongspeed through a labyrinth of passages which took me beyond all usuallandmarks, I found that I was one of several prisoners in a low, bareroom, half-lit (I think) by a single gas-jet. After a pause to recovertheir breath two of the brigands led out the first captive. I nownoticed that a horizontal row of pipes ran along the opposite wall,about three feet from the floor. I was alarmed but not surprised whenthe prisoner was forced into a bending position with his head under thelowest pipe, in the very posture for execution. But I was very muchsurprised a moment later. You will remember that the room was half dark.The two gangsters gave their victim a shove; and instantly no victim wasthere. He vanished; without trace, without sound. It appeared to besheer black magic. Another victim was led out; again the posture for aflogging was assumed; again, instead of flogging,--dissolution,atomisation, annihilation. At last my own turn came. I too received theshove from behind, and found myself falling through a hole or hatch inthe wall into what turned out to be a coal-cellar. Another small boycame hurtling in after me, the door was slammed and bolted behind us,and our captors with a joyous whoop rushed away for more booty. Theywere, no doubt, playing against a rival gang with whom they wouldpresently compare "bags". We were let out again presently, very dirtyand rather cramped, but otherwise none the worse.

Much the most important thing that happened to me at Campbell was that Ithere read Sohrab and Rustum in form under an excellent master whom wecalled Octie. I loved the poem at first sight and have loved it eversince. As the wet fog, in the first line, rose out of the Oxus stream,so out of the whole poem there rose and wrapped me round an exquisite,silvery coolness, a delightful quality of distance and calm, a gravemelancholy. I hardly appreciated then, as I have since learned to do,the central tragedy; what enchanted me was the artist in Pekin with hisivory forehead and pale hands, the cypress in the queen's garden, thebackward glance at Rustum's youth, the pedlars from Khabul, the hushedChorasmian waste. Arnold gave me at once (and the best of Arnold givesme still) a sense, not indeed of passionless vision, but of apassionate, silent gazing at things a long way off. And here observe howliterature actually works. Parrot critics say that Sohrab is a poemfor classicists, to be enjoyed only by those who recognise the Homericechoes. But I, in Octie's form-room (and on Octie be peace) knew nothingof Homer. For me the relation between Arnold and Homer worked the otherway; when I came, years later, to read the Iliad I liked it partlybecause it was for me reminiscent of Sohrab. Plainly, it does notmatter at what point you first break into the system of European poetry.Only keep your ears open and your mouth shut and everything will leadyou to everything else in the end--ogni parte ad ogni parte splende.

About half-way through my first and only term at Campbell I fell ill andwas taken home. My father, for reasons I do not quite know, had becomedissatisfied with the school. He had also been attracted by accounts ofa preparatory school in the town of Wyvern, though quite unconnectedwith Wyvern College; especially by the convenience that if I went theremy brother and I could still do the journey together. Accordingly I hada blessed six weeks at home, with the Christmas holidays to look forwardto at the end and, after that, a new adventure. In a surviving letter myfather writes to my brother that I think myself lucky but he "fears Ishall be very lonely before the end of the week". It is strange thathaving known me all my life he should have known me so little. Duringthese weeks I slept in his room and was thus freed from solitude duringmost of those dark hours in which alone solitude was dreadful to me. Mybrother being absent, he and I could not lead one another into mischief;there was therefore no friction between my father and myself. I rememberno other time in my life of such untroubled affection; we were famouslysnug together. And in the days, when he was out, I entered with completesatisfaction into a deeper solitude than I had ever known. The emptyhouse, the empty, silent rooms, were like a refreshing bath after thecrowded noise of Campbell. I could read, write, and draw to my heart'scontent. Curiously enough it is at this time, not in earlier childhood,that I chiefly remember delighting in fairy tales. I fell deeply underthe spell of Dwarfs--the old bright-hooded, snowy-bearded dwarfs we hadin those days before Arthur Rackham sublimed, or Walt Disney vulgarised,the earthmen. I visualised them so intensely that I came to the veryfrontiers of hallucination; once, walking in the garden, I was for asecond not quite sure that a little man had not run past me into theshrubbery. I was faintly alarmed, but it was not like my night-fears. Afear that guarded the road to Faerie was one I could face. No one is acoward at all points.

IV. I Broaden my Mind

I struck the board, and cry'd, 'No more;
I will abroad.'
What? shall I ever sigh and pine?
My lines and life are free: free as the rode,
Loose as the winde, as large as store.
HERBERT

In January 1911, just turned thirteen, I set out with my brother toWyvern, he for the College and I for a preparatory school which we willcall Chartres. Thus began what may be called the classic period of ourschooldays, the thing we both think of first when boyhood is mentioned.The joint journeys back to school with a reluctant parting at Wyvernstation, the hilarious reunion at the same station for the joint journeyhome, were now the great structural pillars of each year. Growingmaturity is marked by the increasing liberties we take with ourtravelling. At first, on being landed early in the morning at Liverpool,we took the next train south; soon we learned that it was pleasanter tospend the whole morning in the lounge of the Lime Street Hotel with ourmagazines and cigarettes and to proceed to Wyvern by an afternoon trainwhich brought us there at the latest permitted moment. Soon too we gaveup the magazines; we made the discovery (some people never make it) thatreal books can be taken on a journey and that hours of golden readingcan so be added to its other delights. (It is important to acquire earlyin life the power of reading sense wherever you happen to be. I firstread Tamburlaine while travelling from Larne to Belfast in athunderstorm, and first read Browning's Paracelsus by a candle whichwent out and had to be re-lit whenever a big battery fired in a pitbelow me, which I think it did every four minutes all that night.) Thehomeward journey was even more festal. It had an invariable routine:first the supper at a restaurant--it was merely poached eggs and tea butto us the tables of the gods--then the visit to the old Empire (therewere still music halls in those days)--and after that the journey to theLanding Stage, the sight of great and famous ships, the departure, andonce more the blessed salt on our lips.

The smoking was of course, as my father would have said,"surreptitious"; not so the visit to the Empire. He was no Puritan aboutsuch matters, and often of a Saturday night would take us to the BelfastHippodrome. I recognise now that I never had the taste for vaudevillewhich he shared with my brother. At the time I supposed myself to beenjoying the show, but I was mistaken. All those antics lie dead in mymemory and are incapable of rousing the least vibration even ofreminiscent pleasure; whereas the pain of sympathy and vicarioushumiliation which I felt when a "turn" failed is still vivid. What Ienjoyed was merely the etcetera of the show, the bustle and lights, thesense of having a night out, the good spirits of my father in hisholiday mood, and--above all--the admirable cold supper to which we cameback at about ten o'clock. For this was also the classical age of ourdomestic cookery, the age of one Annie Strahan. There were certain"raised pies" set on that table of which a modern English boy has noconception, and which even then would have astonished those who knewonly the poor counterfeits sold in shops.

Chartres, a tall, white building further up the hill than the College,was a smallish school with less than twenty boarders; but it was quiteunlike Oldie's. Here indeed my education really began. The Headmaster,whom we called Tubbs, was a clever and patient teacher; under him Irapidly found my feet in Latin and English and even began to be lookedon as a promising candidate for a scholarship at the College. The foodwas good (though of course we grumbled at it) and we were well caredfor. On the whole I got on well with my school-fellows, though we hadour full share of those lifelong friendships and irreconcilable factionsand deadly quarrels and final settlements and glorious revolutions whichmade up so much of the life of a small boy, and in which I came outsometimes at the bottom and sometimes at the top.

Wyvern itself healed my quarrel with England. The great blue plain belowus and, behind, those green, peaked hills, so mountainous in form andyet so manageably small in size, became almost at once my delight. AndWyvern Priory was the first building that I ever perceived to bebeautiful. And at Chartres I made my first real friends. But there, too,something far more important happened to me: I ceased to be a Christian.

The chronology of this disaster is a little vague, but I know forcertain that it had not begun when I went there and that the process wascomplete very shortly after I left. I will try to set down what I knowof the conscious causes and what I suspect of the unconscious.

Most reluctantly, venturing no blame, and as tenderly as I would at needreveal some error in my own mother, I must begin with dear Miss C., theMatron. No school ever had a better Matron, more skilled and comfortingto boys in sickness, or more cheery and companionable to boys in health.She was one of the most selfless people I have ever known. We all lovedher; I, the orphan, especially. Now it so happened that Miss C., whoseemed old to me, was still in her spiritual immaturity, still hunting,with the eagerness of a soul that had a touch of angelic quality in it,for a truth and a way of life. Guides were even rarer then than now. Shewas (as I should now put it) floundering in the mazes of Theosophy,Rosicrucianism, Spiritualism; the whole Anglo-American Occultisttradition. Nothing was further from her intention than to destroy myfaith; she could not tell that the room into which she brought thiscandle was full of gunpowder. I had never heard of such things before;never, except in a nightmare or a fairy tale, conceived of spirits otherthan God and men. I had loved to read of strange sights and other worldsand unknown modes of being, but never with the slightest belief; eventhe phantom dwarf had only flashed on my mind for a moment. It is agreat mistake to suppose that children believe the things they imagine;and I, long familiar with the whole imaginary world of Animal-Land andIndia (which I could not possibly believe in since I knew I was one ofits creators) was as little likely as any child to make that mistake.But now, for the first time, there burst upon me the idea that theremight be real marvels all about us, that the visible world might be onlya curtain to conceal huge realms uncharted by my very simple theology.And that started in me something with which, on and off, I have hadplenty of trouble since--the desire for the preternatural, simply assuch, the passion for the Occult. Not everyone has this disease; thosewho have will know what I mean. I once tried to describe it in a novel.It is a spiritual lust; and like the lust of the body it has the fatalpower of making everything else in the world seem uninteresting while itlasts. It is probably this passion, more even than the desire for power,which makes magicians. But the result of Miss C.'s conversation did notstop there. Little by little, unconsciously, unintentionally, sheloosened the whole framework, blunted all the sharp edges, of my belief.The vagueness, the merely speculative character, of all this Occultismbegan to spread--yes, and to spread deliciously--to the stern truths ofthe creed. The whole thing became a matter of speculation: I was soon(in the famous words) "altering 'I believe' to 'one does feel'". And oh,the relief of it! Those moonlit nights in the dormitory at Belsen fadedfar away. From the tyrannous noon of revelation I passed into the coolevening twilight of Higher Thought, where there was nothing to beobeyed, and nothing to be believed except what was either comforting orexciting. I do not mean that Miss C. did this; better say that the Enemydid this in me, taking occasion from things she innocently said.

One reason why the Enemy found this so easy was that, without knowingit, I was already desperately anxious to get rid of my religion; andthat for a reason worth recording. By a sheer mistake--and I stillbelieve it to have been an honest mistake--in spiritual technique I hadrendered my private practice of that religion a quite intolerableburden. It came about in this way. Like everyone else I had been told asa child that one must not only say one's prayers but think about whatone was saying. Accordingly, when (at Oldie's) I came to a seriousbelief, I tried to put this into practice. At first it seemed plainsailing. But soon the false conscience (St. Paul's "Law", Herbert's"prattler") came into play. One had no sooner reached "Amen" than itwhispered, "Yes. But are you sure you were really thinking about whatyou said?"; then, more subtly, "Were you, for example, thinking about itas well as you did last night?" The answer, for reasons I did not thenunderstand, was nearly always No. "Very well," said the voice, "hadn'tyou, then, better try it over again?" And one obeyed; but of course withno assurance that the second attempt would be any better.

To these nagging suggestions my reaction was, on the whole, the mostfoolish I could have adopted. I set myself a standard. No clause of myprayer was to be allowed to pass muster unless it was accompanied bywhat I called a "realisation", by which I meant a certain vividness ofthe imagination and the affections. My nightly task was to produce; bysheer will-power a phenomenon which will-power could never produce,which was so ill-defined that I could never say with absolute confidencewhether it had occurred, and which, even when it did occur, was of verymediocre spiritual value. If only someone had read to me old WalterHilton's warning that we must never in prayer strive to extort "bymaistry" what God does not give! But no one did; and night after night,dizzy with desire for sleep and often in a kind of despair, Iendeavoured to pump up my "realisations". The thing threatened to becomean infinite regress. One began of course by praying for good"realisations". But had that preliminary prayer itself been "realised"?This question I think I still had enough sense to dismiss; otherwise itmight have been as difficult to begin my prayers as to end them. How itall comes back! The cold oil-cloth, the quarters chiming, the nightslipping past, the sickening, hopeless weariness. This was the burdenfrom which I longed with soul and body to escape. It had already broughtme to such a pass that the nightly torment projected its gloom over thewhole evening, and I dreaded bedtime as if I were a chronic suffererfrom insomnia. Had I pursued the same road much further I think I shouldhave gone mad.

This ludicrous burden of false duties in prayer provided, of course, anunconscious motive for wishing to shuffle off the Christian faith; butabout the same time, or a little later, conscious causes of doubt arose.One came from reading the classics. Here, especially in Virgil, one waspresented with a mass of religious ideas; and all teachers and editorstook it for granted from the outset that these religious ideas weresheer illusion. No one ever attempted to show in what sense Christianityfulfilled Paganism or Paganism prefigured Christianity. The acceptedposition seemed to be that religions were normally a mere farrago ofnonsense, though our own, by a fortunate exception, was exactly true.The other religions were not even explained, in the earlier Christianfashion, as the work of devils. That I might, conceivably, have beenbrought to believe. But the impression I got was that religion ingeneral, though utterly false, was a natural growth, a kind of endemicnonsense into which humanity tended to blunder. In the midst of athousand such religions stood our own, the thousand and first, labelledTrue. But on what grounds could I believe in this exception? Itobviously was in some general sense the same kind of thing as all therest. Why was it so differently treated? Need I, at any rate, continueto treat it differently? I was very anxious not to.

In addition to this, and equally working against my faith, there was inme a deeply ingrained pessimism; a pessimism, by that time, much more ofintellect than of temper. I was now by no means unhappy; but I had verydefinitely formed the opinion that the universe was, in the main, arather regrettable institution. I am well aware that some will feeldisgust and some will laugh, at the idea of a loutish, well-fed boy inan Eton collar, passing an unfavourable judgement on the cosmos. Theymay be right in either reaction, but no more right because I wore anEton collar. They are forgetting what boyhood felt like from within.Dates are not so important as people believe. I fancy that most of thosewho think at all have done a great deal of their thinking in the firstfourteen years. As to the sources of my pessimism, the reader willremember that, though in many ways most fortunate, yet I had very earlyin life met a great dismay. But I am now inclined to think that theseeds of pessimism were sown before my mother's death. Ridiculous as itmay sound, I believe that the clumsiness of my hands was at the root ofthe matter. How could this be? Not, certainly, that a child says, "Ican't cut a straight line with a pair of scissors, therefore theuniverse is evil." Childhood has no such power of generalisation and isnot (to do it justice) so silly. Nor did my clumsiness produce what isordinarily called an Inferiority Complex. I was not comparing myselfwith other boys; my defeats occurred in solitude. What they really bredin me was a deep (and, of course, inarticulate) sense of resistance oropposition on the part of inanimate things. Even that makes it tooabstract and adult. Perhaps I had better call it a settled expectationthat everything would do what you did not want it to do. Whatever youwanted to remain straight, would bend; whatever you tried to bend wouldfly back to the straight; all knots which you wished to be firm wouldcome untied; all knots you wanted to untie would remain firm. It is notpossible to put it into language without making it comic, and I haveindeed no wish to see it (now) except as something comic. But it isperhaps just these early experiences which are so fugitive and, to anadult, so grotesque, that give the mind its earliest bias, its habitualsense of what is or is not plausible.

There was another predisposing factor. Though the son of a prosperousman--a man by our present tax-ridden standards almost incrediblycomfortable and secure--I had heard ever since I could remember, andbelieved, that adult life was to be an unremitting struggle in which thebest I could hope for was to avoid the workhouse by extreme exertion. Myfather's highly coloured statements on such matters had sunk deeply intomy mind; and I never thought to check them by the very obvious fact thatmost of the adults I actually knew seemed to be living very comfortablelives. I remember summing up what I took to be our destiny, inconversation with my best friend at Chartres, by the formula, "Term,holidays, term, holidays, till we leave school, and then work, work,work till we die." Even if I had been free from this delusion, I think Ishould still have seen grounds for pessimism. One's views, even at thatage, are not wholly determined by one's own momentary situation; even aboy can recognise that there is desert all round him though he, for thenonce, sits in an oasis. I was, in my ineffective way, a tender-heartedcreature; perhaps the most murderous feelings I ever entertained weretowards an under master at Chartres who forbade me to give to a beggarat the school gate. Add to this that my early reading--not only Wells butSir Robert Ball--had lodged very firmly in my imagination the vastnessand cold of space, the littleness of Man. It is not strange that Ishould feel the universe to be a menacing and unfriendly place. Severalyears before I read Lucretius I felt the force of his argument (and itis surely the strongest of all) for atheism--

Nequaquam nobis divinitus esse paratam
Naturam rerum; tanta stat praedita culpa

Had God designed the world, it would not be
A world so frail and faulty as we see.

You may ask how I combined this directly Atheistical thought, this great"Argument from Undesign" with my Occultist fancies. I do not think Iachieved any logical connection between them. They swayed me indifferent moods, and had only this in common, that both made againstChristianity. And so, little by little, with fluctuations which I cannotnow trace, I became an apostate, dropping my faith with no sense of lossbut with the greatest relief.

My stay at Chartres lasted from the spring term of 1911 till the end ofthe summer term 1913, and, as I have said, I cannot give an accuratechronology, between those dates, of my slow apostasy. In other respectsthe period is divided into two; about half-way through it a much lovedunder master, and the even more loved Matron, left at the same time.From that day onwards there was a sharp decline; not, indeed, inapparent happiness but in solid good. Dear Miss C. had been the occasionof much good to me as well as of evil. For one thing, by awakening myaffections, she had done something to defeat that anti-sentimentalinhibition which my early experience had bred in me. Nor would I denythat in all her "Higher Thought", disastrous though its main effect onme was, there were elements of real and disinterested spirituality bywhich I benefited. Unfortunately, once her presence was withdrawn, thegood effects withered and the bad ones remained. The change of masterswas even more obviously for the worse. "Sirrah", as we called him, hadbeen an admirable influence. He was what I would now describe as a wisemadcap: a boisterous, boyish, hearty man, well able to keep hisauthority while yet mixing with us almost as one of ourselves, anuntidy, rollicking man without a particle of affectation. Hecommunicated (what I very much needed) a sense of the gusto with whichlife ought, wherever possible, to be taken. I fancy it was on a run withhim in the sleet that I first discovered how bad weather is to betreated--as a rough joke, a romp. He was succeeded by a young gentlemanjust down from the University whom we may call Pogo. Pogo was a veryminor edition of a Saki, perhaps even a Wodehouse, hero. Pogo was a wit,Pogo was a dressy man, Pogo was a man about town, Pogo was even a lad.After a week or so of hesitation (for his temper was uncertain) we fellat his feet and adored. Here was sophistication, glossy all over, and(dared one believe it?) ready to impart sophistication to us.

We became--at least I became--dressy. It was the age of the "knut": of"spread" ties with pins in them, of very low cut coats and trousers wornvery high to show startling socks, and brogue shoes with immensely widelaces. Something of all this had already trickled to me from the Collegethrough my brother, who was now becoming sufficiently senior to aspireto knuttery. Pogo completed the process. A more pitiful ambition for alout of an overgrown fourteen-year-old with a shilling a week pocketmoney could hardly be imagined; the more so since I am one of those onwhom Nature has laid the doom that whatever they buy and whatever theywear they will always look as if they had come out of an old clothesshop. I cannot even now remember without embarrassment the concern thatI then felt about pressing my trousers and (filthy habit) plastering myhair with oil. A new element had entered my life: Vulgarity. Up till nowI had committed nearly every other sin and folly within my power, but Ihad not yet been flashy.

These hobble-de-hoy fineries were, however, only a small part of our newsophistication. Pogo was a great theatrical authority. We soon knew allthe latest songs. We soon knew all about the famous actresses of thatage--Lily Elsie, Gertie Millar, Zena Dare. Pogo was a fund of informationabout their private lives. We learned from him all the latest jokes;where we did not understand he was ready to give us help. He explainedmany things. After a term of Pogo's society one had the feeling of beingnot twelve weeks but twelve years older.

How gratifying, and how edifying, it would be if I could trace to Pogoall my slips from virtue and wind up by pointing the moral; how muchharm a loose-talking young man can do to innocent boys! Unfortunatelythis would be false. It is quite true that at this time I underwent aviolent, and wholly successful, assault of sexual temptation. But thisis amply accounted for by the age I had then reached and by my recent,in a sense my deliberate, withdrawal of myself from Divine protection. Ido not believe Pogo had anything to do with it. The mere facts ofgeneration I had learned long ago, from another boy, when I was tooyoung to feel much more than a scientific interest in them. Whatattacked me through Pogo was not the Flesh (I had that of my own) butthe World: the desire for glitter, swagger, distinction, the desire tobe in the know. He gave little help, if any, in destroying my chastity,but he made sad work of certain humble and childlike and self-forgetfulqualities which (I think) had remained with me till that moment. I beganto labour very hard to make myself into a fop, a cad, and a snob.

Pogo's communications, however much they helped to vulgarise my mind,had no such electric effect on my senses as the dancing mistress, nor asBekker's Charicles, which was given me for a prize. I never thoughtthat dancing mistress as beautiful as my cousin G., but she was thefirst woman I ever "looked upon to lust after her"; assuredly through nofault of her own. A gesture, a tone of the voice, may in these mattershave unpredictable results. When the schoolroom on the last night of thewinter term was decorated for a dance, she paused, lifted a flag, and,remarking, "I love the smell of bunting," pressed it to her face--and Iwas undone.

You must not suppose that this was a romantic passion. The passion of mylife, as the next chapter will show, belonged to a wholly differentregion. What I felt for the dancing mistress was sheer appetite; theprose and not the poetry of the Flesh. I did not feel at all like aknight devoting himself to a lady; I was much more like a Turk lookingat a Circassian whom he could not afford to buy. I knew quite well whatI wanted. It is common, by the way, to assume that such an experienceproduces a feeling of guilt, but it did not do so in me. And I may aswell say here that the feeling of guilt, save where a moral offencehappened also to break the code of honour or had consequences whichexcited my pity, was a thing which at that time I hardly knew. It tookme as long to acquire inhibitions as others (they say) have taken to getrid of them. That is why I often find myself at such cross-purposes withthe modern world: I have been a converted Pagan living among apostatePuritans.

I would be sorry if the reader passed too harsh a judgement on Pogo. AsI now see it, he was not too old to have charge of boys but too young.He was only an adolescent himself, still immature enough to bedelightedly "grown up" and naif enough to enjoy our greater naïveté. Andthere was a real friendliness in him. He was moved partly by that totell us all he knew or thought he knew. And now, as Herodotus would say,"Goodbye to Pogo."

Meanwhile, side by side with my loss of faith, of virtue, and ofsimplicity, something quite different was going on. It will demand a newchapter.

V. Renaissance

So is there in us a world of love to somewhat, though we know notwhat in the world that should be.
TRAHERNE

I do not much believe in the Renaissance as generally described byhistorians. The more I look into the evidence the less trace I find ofthat vernal rapture which is supposed to have swept Europe in thefifteenth century. I half suspect that the glow in the historians' pageshas a different source, that each is remembering, and projecting, hisown personal Renaissance; that wonderful reawakening which comes to mostof us when puberty is complete. It is properly called a re-birth not abirth, a reawakening not a wakening, because in many of us, besidesbeing a new thing, it is also the recovery of things we had in childhoodand lost when we became boys. For boyhood is very like the "dark ages"not as they were but as they are represented in bad, short histories.The dreams of childhood and those of adolescence may have much incommon; between them, often, boyhood stretches like an alien territoryin which everything (ourselves included) has been greedy, cruel, noisy,and prosaic, in which the imagination has slept and the most un-idealsenses and ambitions have been restlessly, even maniacally, awake.

In my own life it was certainly so. My childhood is at unity with therest of my life; my boyhood not so. Many of the books that pleased me asa child, please me still; nothing but necessity would make me re-readmost of the books that I read at Oldie's or at Campbell. From that pointof view it is all a sandy desert. The authentic "Joy" (as I tried todescribe it in an earlier chapter) had vanished from my life: socompletely that not even the memory or the desire of it remained. Thereading of Sohrab had not given it to me. Joy is distinct not onlyfrom pleasure in general but even from aesthetic pleasure. It must havethe stab, the pang, the inconsolable longing.

This long winter broke up in a single moment, fairly early in my time atChartres. Spring is the inevitable image, but this was not gradual likeNature's springs. It was as if the Arctic itself, all the deep layers ofsecular ice, should change not in a week nor in an hour, but instantly,into a landscape of grass and primroses and orchards in bloom, deafenedwith bird songs and astir with running water. I can lay my hand on thevery moment; there is hardly any fact I know so well, though I cannotdate it. Someone must have left in the schoolroom a literary periodical:The Bookman, perhaps, or the Times Literary Supplement. My eye fellupon a headline and a picture, carelessly, expecting nothing. A momentlater, as the poet says, "The sky had turned round."

What I had read was the words Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods.What I had seen was one of Arthur Rackham's illustrations to thatvolume. I had never heard of Wagner, nor of Siegfried. I thought theTwilight of the Gods meant the twilight in which the gods lived. How didI know, at once and beyond question, that this was no Celtic, or silvan,or terrestrial twilight? But so it was. Pure "Northernness" engulfed me:a vision of huge, clear spaces hanging above the Atlantic in the endlesstwilight of Northern summer, remoteness, severity... and almost atthe same moment I knew that I had met this before, long, long ago (ithardly seems longer now) in Tegner's Drapa, that Siegfried (whateverit might be) belonged to the same world as Balder and thesunward-sailing cranes. And with that plunge back into my own past therearose at once, almost like heartbreak, the memory of Joy itself, theknowledge that I had once had what I had now lacked for years, that Iwas returning at last from exile and desert lands to my own country; andthe distance of the Twilight of the Gods and the distance of my own pastJoy, both unattainable, flowed together into a single, unendurable senseof desire and loss, which suddenly became one with the loss of the wholeexperience, which, as I now stared round that dusty schoolroom like aman recovering from unconsciousness, had already vanished, had eluded meat the very moment when I could first say It is. And at once I knew(with fatal knowledge) that to "have it again" was the supreme and onlyimportant object of desire.

After this everything played into my hands. One of my father's manypresents to us boys had been a gramophone. Thus at the moment when myeyes fell on the words Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods,gramophone catalogues were already one of my favourite forms of reading;but I had never remotely dreamed that the records from Grand Opera withtheir queer German or Italian names could have anything to do with me.Nor did I for a week or two think so now. But then I was assailed from anew quarter. A magazine called The Soundbox was doing synopses ofgreat operas week by week, and it now did the whole Ring. I read in arapture and discovered who Siegfried was and what was the "twilight" ofthe gods. I could contain myself no longer--I began a poem, a heroic poemon the Wagnerian version of the Niblung story. My only source was theabstracts in The Soundbox, and I was so ignorant that I made Alberichrhyme with ditch and Mime with time. My model was Pope's Odysseyand the poem began (with some mixture of mythologies)

Descend to earth, descend, celestial Nine
And chant the ancient legends of the Rhine....

Since the fourth book had carried me only as far as the last scene ofThe Rheingold, the reader will not be surprised to hear that the poemwas never finished. But it was not a waste of time, and I can still seejust what it did for me and where it began to do it. The first threebooks (I may, perhaps, at this distance of time, say it without vanity)are really not at all bad for a boy. At the beginning of the unfinishedfourth it goes all to pieces; and that is exactly the point at which Ireally began to try to make poetry. Up to then, if my lines rhymed andscanned and got on with the story I asked no more. Now, at the beginningof the fourth, I began to try to convey some of the intense excitement Iwas feeling, to look for expressions which would not merely state butsuggest. Of course I failed, lost my prosaic clarity, spluttered,gasped, and presently fell silent; but I had learned what writing means.

All this time I had still not heard a note of Wagner's music, though thevery shape of the printed letters of his name had become to me a magicalsymbol. Next holidays, in the dark, crowded shop of T. Edens Osborne (onwhom be peace), I first heard a record of the Ride of the Valkyries.They laugh at it nowadays, and, indeed, wrenched from its context tomake a concert piece, it may be a poor thing. But I had this in commonwith Wagner, that I was thinking not of concert pieces but of heroicdrama. To a boy already crazed with "the Northernness", whose highestmusical experience had been Sullivan, the Ride came like athunderbolt. From that moment Wagnerian records (principally from theRing, but also from Lohengrin and Parsifal) became the chief drainon my pocket money and the presents I invariably asked for. My generalappreciation of music was not, at first, much altered. "Music" was onething, "Wagnerian music" quite another, and there was no common measurebetween them; it was not a new pleasure but a new kind of pleasure, ifindeed "pleasure" is the right word, rather than trouble, ecstasy,astonishment, "a conflict of sensations without name".

That summer our cousin H. (you remember, I hope, Cousin Quartus's eldestdaughter, the dark Juno, the queen of Olympus) who was now married,asked us to spend some weeks with her on the outskirts of Dublin, inDundrum. There, on her drawing-room table, I found the very book whichhad started the whole affair and which I had never dared to hope Ishould see, Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods illustrated byArthur Rackham. His pictures, which seemed to me then to be the verymusic made visible, plunged me a few fathoms deeper into my delight. Ihave seldom coveted anything as I coveted that book; and when I heardthat there was a cheaper edition at fifteen shillings (though the sumwas to me almost mythological) I knew I could never rest till it wasmine. I got it in the end, largely because my brother went shares withme, purely through kindness, as I now see and then more than halfsuspected, for he was not enslaved by the Northernness. With agenerosity which I was even then half ashamed to accept, he sank in whatmust have seemed to him a mere picture-book seven and sixpence for whichhe knew a dozen better uses.

Although this affair will already seem to some readers undeserving ofthe space I have given it, I cannot continue my story, at all withoutnoting some of its bearings on the rest of my life.

First, you will misunderstand everything unless you realise that, at thetime, Asgard and the Valkyries seemed to me incomparably more importantthan anything else in my experience--than the Matron Miss C., or thedancing mistress, or my chances of a scholarship. More shockingly, theyseemed much more important than my steadily growing doubts aboutChristianity. This may have been--in part, no doubt was--penal blindness;yet that might not be the whole story. If the Northernness seemed then abigger thing than my religion, that may partly have been because myattitude towards it contained elements which my religion ought to havecontained and did not. It was not itself a new religion, for itcontained no trace of belief and imposed no duties. Yet unless I amgreatly mistaken there was in it something very like adoration, somekind of quite disinterested self-abandonment to an object which securelyclaimed this by simply being the object it was. We are taught in thePrayer Book to "give thanks to God for His great glory", as if we owedHim more thanks for being what He necessarily is than for any particularbenefit He confers upon us; and so indeed we do and to know God is toknow this. But I had been far from any such experience; I came farnearer to feeling this about the Norse gods whom I disbelieved in than Ihad ever done about the true God while I believed. Sometimes I canalmost think that I was sent back to the false gods there to acquiresome capacity for worship against the day when the true God shouldrecall me to Himself. Not that I might not have learned this sooner andmore safely, in ways I shall now never know, without apostasy, but thatDivine punishments are also mercies, and particular good is worked outof particular evil, and the penal blindness made sanative.

Secondly, this imaginative Renaissance almost at once produced a newappreciation of external nature. At first, I think, this was parasiticon the literary and musical experiences. On that holiday at Dundrum,cycling among the Wicklow mountains, I was always involuntarily lookingfor scenes that might belong to the Wagnerian world, here a steephillside covered with firs where Mime might meet Sieglinde, there asunny glade where Siegfried might listen to the bird, or presently a dryvalley of rocks where the lithe scaly body of Fafner might emerge fromits cave. But soon (I cannot say how soon) nature ceased to be a merereminder of the books, became herself the medium of the real joy. I donot say she ceased to be a reminder. All Joy reminds. It is never apossession, always a desire for something longer ago or further away orstill "about to be". But Nature and the books now became equalreminders, joint reminders, of--well, of whatever it is. I came no nearerto what some would regard as the only genuine love of nature, thestudious love which will make a man a botanist or an ornithologist. Itwas the mood of a scene that mattered to me; and in tasting that mood myskin and nose were as busy as my eyes.

Thirdly, I passed on from Wagner to everything else I could get hold ofabout Norse mythology, Myths of the Norsem*n, Myths and Legends ofthe Teutonic Race, Mallet's Northern Antiquities. I becameknowledgeable. From these books again and again I received the stab ofJoy. I did not yet notice that it was, very gradually, becoming rarer. Idid not yet reflect on the difference between it and the merelyintellectual satisfaction of getting to know the Eddaic universe. If Icould at this time have found anyone to teach me Old Norse I believe Iwould have worked at it hard.

And finally, the change I had undergone introduces a new difficulty intothe writing of this present book. From that first moment in theschoolroom at Chartres my secret, imaginative life began to be soimportant and so distinct from my outer life that I almost have to telltwo separate stories. The two lives do not seem to influence each otherat all. Where there are hungry wastes, starving for Joy, in the one, theother may be full of cheerful bustle and success; or again, where theouter life is miserable, the other may be brimming over with ecstasy. Bythe imaginative life I here mean only my life as concerned withJoy--including in the outer life much that would ordinarily be calledimagination, as, for example, much of my reading, and all my erotic orambitious fantasies; for these are self-regarding. Even Animal-Land andIndia belong to the "Outer".

But they were no longer Animal-Land and India; some time in the lateeighteenth century (their eighteenth century, not ours) they had beenunited into the single state of Boxen, which yields, oddly, an adjectiveBoxonian, not Boxenian as you might expect. By a wise provision theyretained their separate kings but had a common legislative assembly, theDamerfesk. The electoral system was democratic, but this mattered verymuch less than in England, for the Damerfesk was never doomed to onefixed meeting place. The joint sovereigns could summon it anywhere, sayat the tiny fishing village of Danphabel (the Clovelly of NorthernAnimal-Land, nestling at the foot of the mountains) or in the island ofPiscia; and since the Court knew the sovereigns' choice earlier thananyone else, all local accommodation would be booked before a privatemember got wind of the matter, nor, if he reached the session, had hethe least assurance that it would not be moved elsewhere as soon as hearrived. Hence we hear of a certain member who had never actually sat inthe Damerfesk at all except on one fortunate occasion when it met in hishome town. The records sometimes call this assembly the Parliament, butthat is misleading. It had only a single chamber, and the kingspresided. At the period which I know best the effective control,however, was not in their hands but in those of an all-importantfunctionary known as the Littlemaster (you must pronounce this all asone word with the accent on the first syllable--like Jerrybuilder). TheLittlemaster was a Prime Minister, a judge, and if not alwaysCommander-in-Chief (the records waver on this point) certainly always amember of the General Staff. Such at least were the powers he wieldedwhen I last visited Boxen. They may have been encroachments, for theoffice was held at that time by a man--or to speak more accurately, aFrog--of powerful personality. Lord Big brought to his task one ratherunfair advantage; he had been the tutor of the two young kings andcontinued to hold over them a quasi-parental authority. Their spasmodicefforts to break his yoke were, unhappily, more directed to the evasionof his inquiry into their private pleasures than to any seriouspolitical end. As a result Lord Big, immense in size, resonant of voice,chivalrous (he was the hero of innumerable duels), stormy, eloquent, andimpulsive, almost was the state. The reader will divine a certainresemblance between the life of the two kings under Lord Big and our ownlife under our father. He will be right. But Big was not, in origin,simply our Father first batrachised and then caricatured in somedirections and glorified in others. He was in many ways a propheticportrait of Sir Winston Churchill as Sir Winston Churchill came to beduring the last war; I have indeed seen photographs of that greatstatesman in which, to anyone who has known Boxen, the frog element wasunmistakable. This was not our only anticipation of the real world. LordBig's most consistent opponent, the gadfly that always got inside hisarmour, was a certain small brown bear, a lieutenant in the Navy; andbelieve me or believe me not, Lieutenant James Bar was almost exactlylike Mr. John Betjeman, whose acquaintance I could not then have made.Ever since I have done so, I have been playing Lord Big to his JamesBar.

The interesting thing about the resemblance between Lord Big and myfather is that such reflections of the real world had not been the germout of which Boxen grew. They were more numerous as it drew nearer toits end, a sign of over-ripeness or even the beginning of decay. Go backa little and you will not find them. The two sovereigns who allowedthemselves to be dominated by Lord Big were King Benjamin VIII ofAnimal-Land and Rajah Hawki (I think, VI) of India. They had much incommon with my brother and myself. But their fathers, the elder Benjaminand the elder Hawki, had not. The Fifth Hawki is a shadowy figure; butthe Seventh Benjamin (a rabbit, as you will have guessed) is a roundedcharacter. I can see him still--the heaviest-jowled and squarest-buildedof all rabbits, very fat in his later years, most shabbily and unroyallyclad in his loose brown coat and baggy checked trousers, yet not withouta certain dignity which could, on occasion, take disconcerting forms.His earlier life had been dominated by the belief that he could be botha king and an amateur detective. He never succeeded in the latter role,partly because the chief enemy whom he was pursuing (Mr. Baddlesmere)was not really a criminal at all but a lunatic--a complication whichwould have thrown out the plans of Sherlock Holmes himself. But he veryoften got himself kidnapped, sometimes for longish periods, and causedgreat anxiety to his court (we do not learn that his colleague, Hawki V,shared this). Once, on his return from such a misadventure, he had greatdifficulty in establishing his identity; Baddlesmere had dyed him andthe familiar brown figure reappeared as a piebald rabbit. Finally (whatwill not boys think of?) he was a very early experimenter with what hassince been called artificial insemination. The judgement of historycannot pronounce him either a good rabbit or a good King; but he was nota nonentity. He ate prodigiously.

And now that I have opened the gate, all the Boxonians, like the ghostsin Homer, come clamouring for mention. But they must be denied it.Readers who have built a world would rather tell of their own than hearof mine; those who have not would perhaps be bewildered and repelled.Nor had Boxen any connection with Joy. I have mentioned it at all onlybecause to omit it would have been to misrepresent this period of mylife.

One caution must here be repeated. I have been describing a life inwhich, plainly, imagination of one sort or another played the dominantpart. Remember that it never involved the least grain of belief; I nevermistook imagination for reality. About the Northernness no such questioncould arise: it was essentially a desire and implied the absence of itsobject. And Boxen we never could believe in, for we had made it. Nonovelist (in that sense) believes in his own characters.

At the end of the Summer Term 1913 I won a classical entrancescholarship to Wyvern College.

VI. Bloodery

Any way for Heaven sake
So I were out of your whispering.
WEBSTER

Now that we have done with Chartres we may call Wyvern College simplyWyvern, or more simply still, as Wyvernians themselves call it, TheColl.

Going to the Coll was the most exciting thing that had yet happened inmy outer life. At Chartres we had lived under the shadow of the Coll. Wewere often taken there to see matches or sports or the finish of thegreat Goldbury Run. These visits turned our heads. The crowd of boysolder than oneself, their dazzling air of sophistication, scraps oftheir esoteric talk overheard, were like Park Lane in the old "Season"to a girl who is to be a débutante next year. Above all, the Bloods,the adored athletes and prefects, were an embodiment of all worldlypomp, power, and glory. Beside them Pogo shrank into insignificance;what is a Master compared with a Blood? The whole school was a greattemple for the worship of these mortal gods; and no boy ever went theremore prepared to worship them than I.

If you have not been at such a school as Wyvern, you may ask what aBlood is. He is a member of the school aristocracy. Foreign readersmust clearly understand that this aristocracy has nothing whatever to dowith the social position of the boys in the outer world. Boys of good,or wealthy, family are no more likely to be in it than anyone else; theonly nobleman in my House at Wyvern never became a Blood. Shortly beforemy time there the son of a very queer customer had been at least on thefringe of Bloodery. The qualifying condition for Bloodery is that oneshould have been at the school for a considerable time. This by itselfwill not get you in, but newness will certainly exclude you. The mostimportant qualification is athletic prowess. Indeed if this issufficiently brilliant it makes you a Blood automatically. If it is alittle less brilliant, then good looks and personality will help. So, ofcourse, will fashion, as fashion is understood at your school. A wisecandidate for Bloodery will wear the right clothes, use the right slang,admire the right things, laugh at the right jokes. And of course, as inthe outer world, those on the fringes of the privileged class can, anddo, try to worm their way into it by all the usual arts of pleasing.

At some schools, I am told, there is a sort of dyarchy. An aristocracyof Bloods, supported or at least tolerated by popular sentiment, standsover against an official ruling class of prefects appointed by theMasters. I believe they usually appoint it from the highest form, sothat it has some claim to be an intelligentsia. It was not so at theColl. Those who were made prefects were nearly all Bloods and they didnot have to be in any particular form. Theoretically (though I do notsuppose this would ever happen) the dunce at the bottom of the lowestform could have been made the captain--in our language, the Head--of theColl. We thus had only a single governing class, in whom every kind ofpower, privilege, and prestige were united. Those to whom thehero-worship of their juniors would in any case have gone, and thosewhose astuteness and ambition would under any system have enabled themto rise, were the same whom the official power of the Masters supported.Their position was emphasised by special liberties, clothes, priorities,and dignities which affected every side of school life. This, you willsee, makes a pretty strong class. But it was strengthened still furtherby a factor which distinguishes school from ordinary life. In a countrygoverned by an oligarchy, huge numbers of people, and among them somevery stirring spirits, know they can never hope to get into thatoligarchy; it may therefore be worth their while to attempt arevolution. At the Coll the lowest social class of all were too young,therefore too weak, to dream of revolt. In the middle class--boys whowere no longer fa*gs but not yet Bloods--those who alone had physicalstrength and popularity enough to qualify them as leaders of arevolution were already beginning to hope for Bloodery themselves. Itsuited them better to accelerate their social progress by courting theexisting Bloods than to risk a revolt which, in the unlikely event ofits succeeding, would destroy the very prize they were longing to share.And if at last they despaired of ever doing so--why, by that time theirschooldays were nearly over. Hence the Wyvernian constitution wasunbreakable. Schoolboys have often risen against their Masters; I doubtif there has ever been or ever can be a revolt against Bloods.

It is not, then, surprising if I went to the Coll prepared to worship.Can any adult aristocracy present the World to us in quite such analluring form as the hierarchy of a public school? Every motive forprostration is brought to bear at once on the mind of the New Boy whenhe sees a Blood; the natural respect of the thirteen-year-old for thenineteen-year-old, the fan's feeling for a film-star, the suburbanwoman's feeling for a duch*ess, the newcomer's awe in the presence of theOld Hand, the street urchin's dread of the police.

One's first hours at a public school are unforgettable. Our House was atall, narrow stone building (and, by the way, the only house in theplace which was not an architectural nightmare) rather like a ship. Thedeck on which we chiefly lived consisted of two very dark stonecorridors at right angles to one another. The doors off them opened intothe studies--little rooms about six feet square, each shared by two orthree boys. The very sight of them was ravishing to a boy from a Prep.school who had never before had a pied-à-terre of his own. As we werestill living (culturally) in the Edwardian period, each study imitatedas closely as possible the cluttered appearance of an Edwardiandrawing-room; the aim was to fill the tiny cell as full as it could holdwith bookcases, corner cupboards, knick-knacks, and pictures. There weretwo larger rooms on the same floor; one the "Pres' Room", the synod ofOlympus, and the other the New Boys' Study. It was not like a study atall. It was larger, darker, and undecorated; an immovable bench ranround a clamped table. But we knew, we ten or twelve recruits, that notall of us would be left in the New Boys' Study. Some of us would begiven "real" studies; the residue would occupy the opprobrious place fora term or so. That was the great hazard of our first evening; one was tobe taken and another left.

As we sat round our clamped table, silent for the most part and speakingin whispers when we spoke, the door would be opened at intervals; a boywould look in, smile (not at us but to himself) and withdraw. Once, overthe shoulder of the smiler there came another face, and a chucklingvoice said, "Ho-ho! I know what you're looking for." Only I knew whatit was all about, for my brother had played Chesterfield to my Stanhopeand instructed me in the manners of the Coll. None of the boys wholooked in and smiled was a Blood; they were all quite young and therewas something common to the faces of them all. They were, in fact, thereigning or fading Tarts of the House, trying to guess which of us weretheir destined rivals or successors.

It is possible that some readers will not know what a House Tart was.First, as to the adjective. All life at Wyvern was lived, so to speak,in the two concentric circles of Coll and House. You could be a Collpre. or merely a House pre. You could be a Coll Blood or merely a HouseBlood, a Coll Punt (i.e. a pariah, an unpopular person) or merely aHouse Punt; and of course a Coll Tart or merely a House Tart. A Tart is[4]a pretty and effeminate-looking small boy who acts as a catamiteto one or more of his seniors, usually Bloods. Usually, not always.Though our oligarchy kept most of the amenities of life to themselves,they were, on this point, liberal; they did not impose chastity on themiddle-class boy in addition to all his other disabilities. Pederastyamong the lower classes was not "side", or at least not serious side;not like putting one's hands in one's pockets or wearing one's coatunbuttoned. The gods had a sense of proportion.

[Footnote 4]Here, and throughout this account, I sometimes use the "historicpresent". Heaven forfend I should be taken to mean that Wyvern isthe same to-day.

The Tarts had an important function to play in making school (what itwas advertised to be) a preparation for public life. They were not likeslaves, for their favours were (nearly always) solicited, not compelled.Nor were they exactly like prostitutes, for the liaison often had somepermanence and, far from being merely sensual, was highlysentimentalised. Nor were they paid (in hard cash, I mean) for theirservices; though of course they had all the flattery, unofficialinfluence, favour, and privileges which the mistresses of the great havealways enjoyed in adult society. That was where the Preparation forPublic Life came in. It would appear from Mr. Arnold Lunn's Harroviansthat the Tarts at his school acted as informers. None of ours did. Iought to know, for one of my friends shared a study with a minor Tart;and except that he was sometimes turned out of the study when one of theTart's lovers came in (and that, after all, was only natural) he hadnothing to complain of. I was not shocked by these things. For me, atthat age, the chief drawback to the whole system was that it bored meconsiderably. For you will have missed the atmosphere of our Houseunless you picture the whole place from week's end to week's endbuzzing, tittering, hinting, whispering about this subject. After games,gallantry was the principal topic of polite conversation; who had "acase with" whom, whose star was in the ascendant, who had whose photo,who and when and how often and what night and where.... I suppose itmight be called the Greek Tradition. But the vice in question is one towhich I had never been tempted, and which, indeed, I still find opaqueto the imagination. Possibly, if I had only stayed longer at the Coll, Imight, in this respect as in others, have been turned into a Normal Boy,as the system promises. As things were, I was bored.

Those first days, like your first days in the army, were spent in afrantic endeavour to find out what you had to do. One of my first dutieswas to find out what "Club" I was in. Clubs were the units to which wewere assigned for compulsory games; they belonged to the Collorganisation, not the House organisation, so I had to go to anotice-board "Up Coll" to get my facts. And first to find the place--andthen to dare to squeeze oneself into the crowd of more important boysaround the notice-board--and then to begin reading through five hundrednames, but always with one eye on your watch, for of course there issomething else to be done within ten minutes. I was forced away from theboard before I had found my name, and so, sweating, back to the House,in a flurry of anxiety, wondering how I could find time to do the jobto-morrow and what unheard-of disaster might follow if I could not.(Why, by the way, do some writers talk as if care and worry were thespecial characteristics of adult life? It appears to me that there ismore atra cura in an average schoolboy's week than in a grown man'saverage year.)

When I reached the House something gloriously unexpected happened. Atthe door of the Pres' Room stood one Fribble; a mere House Blood, it istrue, even a minor House Blood, but to me a sufficiently exalted figure;a youth of the lean, laughing type. I could hardly believe it when heactually addressed me. "Oh, I say, Lewis," he bawled, "I can tell youyour Club. You're in the same one as me, B6." What a transition from allbut despair to elation I underwent! All my anxiety was laid to rest. Andthen the graciousness of Fribble, the condescension! If a reigningmonarch had asked me to dine, I could hardly have been more flattered.But there was better to follow. On every half-holiday I went dutifullyto the B6 notice-board to see whether my name was down to play thatafternoon or not. And it never was. This was pure joy, for of course Ihated games. My native clumsiness, combined with the lack of earlytraining for which Belsen was responsible, had ruled out all possibilityof my ever playing well enough to amuse myself, let alone to satisfyother players. I accepted games (quite a number of boys do) as one ofthe necessary evils of life, comparable to Income Tax or the Dentist.And so, for a week or two, I was in clover.

Then the blow fell. Fribble had lied. I was in a totally different Club.My name had more than once appeared on a notice-board I had never seen.I had committed the serious crime of "skipping Clubs". The punishmentwas a flogging administered by the Head of the Coll in the presence ofthe assembled Coll Pres. To the Head of the Coll himself--a red-headed,pimply boy with a name like Borage or Porridge--I can bear no grudge; itwas to him a routine matter. But I must give him a name because the realpoint of the story requires it. The emissary (some Blood a little lowerthan the Head himself) who summoned me to execution attempted to revealto me the heinousness of my crime by the words, "Who are you? Nobody.Who is Porridge? THE MOST IMPORTANT PERSON THERE IS."

I thought then, and I still think, that this rather missed the point.There were two perfectly good morals he could have drawn. He might havesaid, "We are going to teach you never to rely on second-handinformation when first-hand is available"--a very profitable lesson. Orhe might have said, "What made you think that a Blood could not be aliar?" But, "Who are you? Nobody," however just, seems hardly relevant.The implication is that I have skipped Club in arrogance or defiance.And I puzzle endlessly over the question whether the speaker reallybelieved that. Did he really think it likely that an utterly helplessstranger in a new society, a society governed by an irresistible classon whose favour all his hopes of happiness depended, had set himself inthe first week to pull the nose of The Most Important Person There Is?It is a problem which has met me many times in later life. What does acertain type of examiner mean when he says, "To show up work like thisis an insult to the examiners"? Does he really think that the ploughedcandidate has insulted him?

Another problem is Fribble's share in my little catastrophe. Was his lieto me a hoax, a practical joke? Was he paying off some old score againstmy brother? Or was he (as I now think most likely) simply what ourancestors called a Rattle, a man from whose mouth information, true andfalse, flows out all day long without consideration, almost withoutvolition? Some might think that, whatever his motive had originallybeen, he might have come forward and confessed his part when he saw whatI was in for. But that, you know, was hardly to be expected. He was avery minor Blood, still climbing up the social stair; Burradge wasalmost as far above Fribble as Fribble was above me. By coming forwardhe would have imperilled his social position, in a community wheresocial advancement was the one thing that mattered; school is apreparation for public life.

In justice to Wyvern, I must add that Fribble was not, by our standards,quite a fair representative of Bloodery. He had offended against therules of gallantry in a manner which (my brother tells me) would havebeen impossible in his day. I said just now that the Tarts weresolicited, not compelled. But Fribble did use all his prefectorialpowers for a whole term to persecute a boy called, let us say, Parsleywho had refused his suit. This was quite easy for Fribble to do. Theinnumerable small regulations which a junior boy could break almostunawares enabled a prefect to make sure that a given boy was nearlyalways in trouble, while the fa*gging system made it easy to see that hehad no leisure at all at any hour of any day. So Parsley learned what itwas to refuse even a minor Blood. The story would be more impressive ifParsley had been a virtuous boy and had refused on moral grounds.Unfortunately he was "as common as a barber's chair", had been areigning toast in my brother's day, and was now almost past his bloom.He drew the line at Fribble. But Fribble's attempt at coercion was theonly instance of its kind I ever knew.

Indeed, taking them by and large, and considering the temptations ofadolescents, so privileged, so flattered, our Bloods were not a bad lot.The Count was even kindly. The Parrot was nothing worse than a gravefool: "Yards-of-Face" they called him. Stopfish, whom some thoughtcruel, even had moral principles; in his younger days many (I'm told)had desired him as a Tart, but he had kept his virtue. "Pretty, but nogood to anyone; he's pie," would be the Wyvernian comment. The hardestto defend, perhaps, is Tennyson. We did not much mind his being ashoplifter; some people thought it rather clever of him to come backfrom a tour of the town with more ties and socks than he had paid for.We minded more his favourite punishment for us rabble, "a clip". Yet hecould truly have pleaded to the authorities that it meant merely a boxon the ear. He would not have added that the patient was made to standwith his left ear, temple and cheek almost, but not quite, touching thejamb of a doorway, and then struck with full force on the right. We alsogrumbled a little in secret when he got up a tournament (eitherexplicitly or virtually compulsory, I think) in a game called YardCricket, collected subscriptions, and neither held the tournament norreturned the cash. But you will remember that this happened in theMarconi period, and to be a prefect is a Preparation for Public Life.And for all of them, even Tennyson, one thing can be said; they werenever drunk. I was told that their predecessors, a year before I came,were sometimes very drunk indeed in the House corridor at mid-day. Infact, odd as it would have sounded to an adult, I joined the House whenit was in a stern mood of moral rearmament. That was the point of aseries of speeches which the prefects addressed to us all in the HouseLibrary during my first week. It was explained with a wealth ofthreatenings that we were to be pulled Up or Together or whereverdecadents are pulled by moral reformers. Tennyson was very great on thatoccasion. He had a fine bass voice and sang solos in the choir. I knewone of his Tarts.

Peace to them all. A worse fate awaited them than the most vindictivefa*g among us could have wished. Ypres and the Somme ate up most of them.They were happy while their good days lasted.

My flogging by pimply old Ullage was no unmerciful affair in itself. Thereal trouble was that I think I now became, thanks to Fribble, a markedman; the sort of dangerous New Boy who skips Clubs. At least I thinkthat must have been the main reason why I was an object of dislike toTennyson. There were probably others. I was big for my age, a great loutof a boy, and that sets one's seniors against one. I was also useless atgames. Worst of all, there was my face. I am the kind of person who getstold, "And take that look off your face too." Notice, once more, themingled justice and injustice of our lives. No doubt in conceit orill-temper I have often intended to look insolent or truculent; but onthose occasions people don't appear to notice it. On the other hand, themoments at which I was told to "take that look off" were usually thosewhen I intended to be most abject. Can there have been a freemansomewhere among my ancestors whose expression, against my will, lookedout?

As I have hinted before, the fa*gging system is the chief medium by whichthe Bloods, without breaking any rule, can make a junior boy's life aweariness to him. Different schools have different kinds of fa*gging. Atsome of them, individual Bloods have individual fa*gs. This is the systemmost often depicted in school stories; it is sometimes representedas--and, for all I know, sometimes really is--a fruitful relation as ofknight and squire, in which service on the one part is rewarded withsome degree of countenance and protection on the other. But whatever itsmerits may be, we never experienced them at Wyvern. fa*gging with us wasas impersonal as the labour-market in Victorian England; in that way,too, the Coll was a preparation for public life. All boys under acertain seniority constituted a labour pool, the common property of allthe Bloods. When a Blood wanted his O.T.C. kit brushed and polished, orhis boots cleaned, or his study "done out", or his tea made, he shouted.We all came running, and of course the Blood gave the work to the boy hemost disliked. The kit-cleaning--it took hours, and then, when you hadfinished it, your own kit was still to do--was the most detestedcorvée. Shoe-cleaning was a nuisance not so much in itself as in itsattendant circ*mstances. It came at an hour which was vital for a boylike me who, having won a scholarship, had been placed in a high formand could hardly, by all his best efforts, keep up with the work. Hencethe success of one's whole day in Form might depend on the preciousforty minutes between breakfast and Morning School, when one went overthe set passages of translation with other boys in the same Form. Thiscould be done only if one escaped being fa*gged as a shoeblack. Not, ofcourse, that it takes forty minutes to clean a pair of shoes. What takesthe time is waiting in the queue of other fa*gs in the "boot-hole" to getyour turn at the brushes and blacking. The whole look of that cellar,the darkness, the smell, and (for most of the year) the freezing cold,are a vivid memory. You must not of course suppose that, in thosespacious days, we lacked servants. There were two official "bootboys"paid by the Housemaster for cleaning all boots and shoes, and everyone,including us fa*gs who had cleaned both our own shoes and the Bloods'shoes daily, tipped the bootboys at the end of each term for theirservices.

For a reason which all English readers will understand (others will hearsomething of it in the next chapter) I am humiliated and embarrassed athaving to record that as time went on I came to dislike the fa*ggingsystem. No true defender of the Public Schools will believe me if I saythat I was tired. But I was--dog-tired, cab-horse tired, tired (almost)like a child in a factory. Many things besides fa*gging contributed toit. I was big and had possibly outgrown my strength. My work in Form wasalmost beyond me. I was having a good deal of dental trouble at thetime, and many nights of clamorous pain. Never, except in the front linetrenches (and not always there) do I remember such aching and continuousweariness as at Wyvern. Oh, the implacable day, the horror of waking,the endless desert of hours that separated one from bed-time! Andremember that, even without fa*gging, a school day contains hardly anyleisure for a boy who does not like games. For him, to pass from theform-room to the playing field is simply to exchange work in which hecan take some interest for work in which he can take none, in whichfailure is more severely punished, and in which (worst of all) he mustfeign an interest.

I think that this feigning, this ceaseless pretence of interest inmatters to me supremely boring, was what wore me out more than anythingelse. If the reader will picture himself, unarmed, shut up for thirteenweeks on end, night and day, in a society of fanatical golfers--or, if heis a golfer himself, let him substitute fishermen, theosophists,bimetallists, Baconians, or German undergraduates with a taste forautobiography--who all carry revolvers and will probably shoot him if heever seems to lose interest in their conversation, he will have an ideaof my school life. Even the hardy Chowbok (in Erewhon) quailed at sucha destiny. For games (and gallantry) were the only subjects, and I caredfor neither. But I must seem to care for both, for a boy goes to aPublic School precisely to be made a normal, sensible boy--a goodmixer--to be taken out of himself; and eccentricity is severelypenalised.

You must not, from this, hastily conclude that most boys liked playinggames any better than I did. To escape Clubs was considered by dozens ofboys an obvious good. Leave off Clubs required the Housemaster'ssignature, and that harmless Merovingian's signature was imitable. Acompetent forger (I knew one member of the profession) by manufacturingand selling forged signatures could make a steady addition to his pocketmoney. The perpetual talk about games depended on three things. First,on the same sort of genuine (though hardly practical) enthusiasm whichsends the crowds to the League Football Matches. Few wanted to play, butmany wanted to watch, to participate vicariously in the triumphs of theColl, or the House, team. Secondly, this natural feeling had thevigilant backing of all the Bloods and nearly all the Masters. To belukewarm on such matters was the supreme sin. Hence enthusiasm had to beexaggerated where it existed and simulated where it did not. At cricketmatches minor Bloods patrolled the crowd of spectators to detect andpunish any "slackness" in the applause; it reminds one of theprecautions taken when Nero sang. For of course the whole structure ofBloodery would collapse if the Bloods played in the spirit of play, fortheir recreation; there must be audience and limelight. And this bringsus to the third reason. For boys who were not yet Bloods but who hadsome athletic promise, Games were essentially a moyen de parvenir.There was nothing recreational about Clubs for them any more than forme. They went to the playing fields not as men go to the tennis-club butas stage-struck girls go to an Audition; tense and anxious, racked withdazzling hopes and sickening fears, never in peace of mind till they hadwon some notice which would set their feet on the first rung of thesocial ladder. And not then at peace either; for not to advance is tofall back.

The truth is that organised and compulsory games had, in my day,banished the element of play from school life almost entirely. There wasno time to play (in the proper sense of the word). The rivalry was toofierce, the prizes too glittering, the "hell of failure" too severe.

The only boy, almost, who "played" (but not at games) was our Irishearl. But then he was an exception to all rules; not because of hisearldom but because he was an untamable Irishman, anarch in grain, whomno society could iron out. He smoked a pipe in his first term. He wentoff by night on strange expeditions to a neighbouring city; not, Ibelieve, for women, but for harmless rowdyism, low life, and adventure.He always carried a revolver. I remember it well, for he had a habit ofloading one chamber only, rushing into your study, and then firing off(if that is the right word) all the others at you, so that your lifedepended on his counting accurately. I felt at the time, and I feelstill, that this (unlike the fa*gging) was the sort of thing no sensibleboy could object to. It was done in defiance both of masters and Bloods,it was wholly useless, and there was no malice in it. I likedBallygunnian; he, too, was killed in France. I do not think he everbecame a Blood; if he had, he wouldn't have noticed it. He cared nothingfor the limelight or for social success. He passed through the Collwithout paying it any attention.

I suppose Popsy--the pretty red-head who was housemaid on "the Privateside"--might also rank as an element making for "play". Popsy, whencaught and carried bodily into our part of the House (I think by theCount), was all giggles and screams. She was too sensible a girl tosurrender her "virtue" to any Blood; but it was rumoured that those whofound her in the right time and place might induce her to give certainlessons in anatomy. Perhaps they lied.

I have hardly mentioned a Master yet. One master, dearly loved andreverenced, will appear in the next chapter. But other masters arehardly worth speaking of. It is difficult for parents (and moredifficult, perhaps, for schoolmasters) to realise the unimportance ofmost masters in the life of a school. Of the good and evil which is doneto a schoolboy masters, in general, do little, and know less. Our ownHousemaster must have been an upright man, for he fed us excellently.For the rest, he treated his House in a very gentlemanly, uninquisitiveway. He sometimes walked round the dormitories of a night, but he alwayswore boots, trod heavily and coughed at the door. He was no spy and nokill-joy, honest man. Live and let live.

As I grew more and more tired, both in body and mind, I came to hateWyvern. I did not notice the real harm it was doing to me. It wasgradually teaching me to be a prig; that is, an intellectual prig or (inthe bad sense) a High Brow. But that subject must wait for anotherchapter. At the tail-end of this I must repeat (for this is the overallimpression left by Wyvern) that I was tired. Consciousness itself wasbecoming the supreme evil; sleep, the prime good. To lie down, to be outof the sound of voices, to pretend and grimace and evade and slink nomore, that was the object of all desire--if only there were not anothermorning ahead--if only sleep could last for ever!

VII. Light and Shade

No situation, however wretched it seems, but has some sort of comfortattending it.
GOLDSMITH

Here's a fellow, you say, who used to come before us as a moral andreligious writer, and now, if you please, he's written a whole chapterdescribing his old school as a very furnace of impure loves without oneword on the heinousness of the sin. But there are two reasons. One youshall hear before this chapter ends. The other is that, as I have said,the sin in question is one of the two (gambling is the other) which Ihave never been tempted to commit. I will not indulge in futilephilippics against enemies I never met in battle.

("This means, then, that all the other vices you have so largely writtenabout..." Well, yes, it does, and more's the pity; but it's nothingto our purpose at the moment.)

I have now to tell you how Wyvern made me a prig. When I went there,nothing was further from my mind than the idea that my private taste forfairly good books, for Wagner, for mythology, gave me any sort ofsuperiority to those who read nothing but magazines and listened tonothing but the (then fashionable) Rag-time. The claim might seemunbelievable if I did not add that I had been protected from this sortof conceit by downright ignorance. Mr. Ian Hay somewhere draws a pictureof the reading minority at a Public School in his day as boys who talkedabout "G. B. S. and G. K. C." in the same spirit in which other boyssecretly smoked; both sets were inspired by the same craving forforbidden fruit and the same desire to be grown-up. And I suppose boyssuch as he describes might come from Chelsea or Oxford or Cambridgehomes where they heard things about contemporary literature. But myposition was wholly different. I was, for example, a great reader ofShaw about the time I went to Wyvern, but I had never dreamed thatreading Shaw was anything to be proud of. Shaw was an author on myfather's shelves like any other author. I began reading him because hisDramatic Opinions contained a good deal about Wagner and Wagner's veryname was then a lure to me. Thence I went on to read most of the otherShaws we had. But how his reputation stood in the literary world Ineither knew nor cared; I didn't know there was "a literary world". Myfather told me Shaw was "a mountebank" but that there were some laughsin John Bull's Other Island. It was the same with all my otherreading; no one (thank God) had ever admired or encouraged it. (WilliamMorris, for some unfathomable reason, my father always referred to as"that whistlepainter".) I might be--no doubt I was--conceited at Chartresfor being good at my Latin; this was something recognised asmeritorious. But "Eng. Lit." was blessedly absent from the officialsyllabus, so I was saved from any possibility of conceit about it. Neverin my life had I read a work of fiction, poetry, or criticism in my ownlanguage except because, after trying the first few pages, I liked thetaste of it. I could not help knowing that most other people, boys andgrown-ups alike, did not care for the books I read. A very few tastes Icould share with my father, a few more with my brother; apart from that,there was no point of contact, and this I accepted as a sort of naturallaw. If I reflected on it at all, it would have given me, I think, aslight feeling, not of superiority, but of inferiority. The latestpopular novel was so obviously a more adult, a more normal, a moresophisticated taste than any of mine. A certain shame or bashfulnessattached itself to whatever one deeply and privately enjoyed. I went tothe Coll far more disposed to excuse my literary tastes than to plumemyself on them.

But this innocence did not last. It was, from the first, a little shakenby all that I soon began to learn from my form-master about the gloriesof literature. I was at last made free of the dangerous secret thatothers had, like me, found there "enormous bliss" and been maddened bybeauty. Among the other New Bugs of my year, too, I met a pair of boyswho came from the Dragon School at Oxford (where Naomi Mitchison in her'teens had just produced her first play) and from them also I got thedim impression that there was a world I had never dreamed of, a world inwhich poetry, say, was a thing public and accepted, just as Games andGallantry were accepted at Wyvern; nay, a world in which a taste forsuch things was almost meritorious. I felt as Siegfried felt when itfirst dawned on him that he was not Mime's son. What had been "my" tastewas apparently "our" taste (if only I could ever meet the "we" to whomthat "our" belonged). And if "our" taste, then--by a periloustransition--perhaps "good" taste or "the right taste". For thattransition involves a kind of Fall. The moment good taste knows itself,some of its goodness is lost. Even then, however, it is not necessary totake the further downward step of despising the "philistines" who do notshare it. Unfortunately I took it. Hitherto, though increasinglymiserable at Wyvern, I had been half ashamed of my own misery, stillready (if I were only allowed) to admire the Olympians, still a littleoverawed, cowed rather than resentful. I had, you see, no standing placeagainst the Wyvernian ethos, no side for which I could play againstit; it was a bare "I" against what seemed simply the world. But themoment that "I" became, however vaguely, a we--and Wyvern not theworld but a world--the whole thing changed. It was now possible, atleast in thought, to retaliate. I can remember what may well have beenthe precise moment of this transition. A prefect called Blugg or Glubbor some such name stood opposite me, belching in my face, giving me someorder. The belching was not intended as an insult. You can't "insult" afa*g any more than an animal. If Bulb had thought of my reactions at all,he would have expected me to find his eructations funny. What pushed meover the edge into pure priggery was his face--the puffy bloated cheeks,the thick, moist, sagging lower lip, the yokel blend of drowsiness andcunning. "The lout!" I thought. "The clod! The dull, crass clown! Forall his powers and privileges, I would not be he." I had become a Prig,a High-Brow.

The interesting thing is that the Public School system had thus producedthe very thing which it was advertised to prevent or cure. For you mustunderstand (if you have not been dipped in that tradition yourself) thatthe whole thing was devised to "knock the nonsense" out of the smallerboys and "put them in their place". "If the junior boys weren't fa*gged,"as my brother once said, "they would become insufferable." That is why Ifelt so embarrassed, a few pages ago, when I had to confess that I gotrather tired of perpetual fa*gging. If you say this, every true defenderof the system will diagnose your case at once, and they will alldiagnose it in the same way. "Ho-ho!" they will cry, "so that's thetrouble! Thought yourself too good to black your betters' boots, didyou? That just shows how badly you needed to be fa*gged. It's to cureyoung prigs like you that the system exists." That any cause except"thinking yourself too good for it" might awaken discontent with a fa*g'slot will not be admitted. You have only to transfer the thing to adultlife and you will, apparently, see the full logic of the position. Ifsome neighbouring V.I.P. had irresistible authority to call on you forany service he pleased at any hour when you were not in the office--if,when you came home on a summer evening, tired from work and with morework to prepare against the morrow, he could drag you to the links andmake you his caddy till the light failed--if at last he dismissed youunthanked with a suitcase full of his clothes to brush and clean andreturn to him before breakfast, and a hamper full of his foul linen foryour wife to wash and mend--and if, under this regime, you were notalways perfectly happy and contented; where could the cause lie exceptin your own vanity? What else, after all, could it be? For, almost bydefinition, every offence a junior boy commits must be due to "cheek" or"side"; and to be miserable, even to fall short of rapturous enthusiasm,is an offence.

Obviously a certain grave danger was ever-present to the minds of thosewho built up the Wyvernian hierarchy. It seemed to them self-evidentthat, if you left things to themselves, boys of nineteen who playedrugger for the county and boxed for the school would everywhere beknocked down and sat on by boys of thirteen. And that, you know, wouldbe a very shocking spectacle. The most elaborate mechanism, therefore,had to be devised for protecting the strong against the weak, the closecorporation of Old Hands against the parcel of new-comers who werestrangers to one another and to everyone in the place, the poor,trembling lions against the furious and ravening sheep.

There is, of course, some truth in it. Small boys can be cheeky; andhalf an hour in the society of a French thirteen-year-old makes most ofus feel that there is something to be said for fa*gging after all. Yet Icannot help thinking that the bigger boys would have been able to holdtheir own without all the complicated assurances, pattings on the back,and encouragement which the authorities gave them. For, of course, theseauthorities, not content with knocking the "nonsense" out of the sheep,were always coaxing and petting an at least equal quantity of "nonsense"into the lions; power and privilege and an applauding audience for thegames they play. Might not the mere nature of boys have done all, andrather more than all, that needed doing in this direction withoutassistance?

But whatever the rationality of the design, I contend that it did notachieve its object. For the last thirty years or so England has beenfilled with a bitter, truculent, sceptical, debunking, and cynicalintelligentsia. A great many of them were at public schools, and Ibelieve very few of them liked it. Those who defend the schools will, ofcourse, say that these Prigs are the cases which the system failed tocure; they were not kicked, mocked, fa*gged, flogged, and humiliatedenough. But surely it is equally possible that they are the products ofthe system? that they were not Prigs at all when they came to theirschools but were made Prigs by their first year, as I was? For, really,that would be a very natural result. Where oppression does notcompletely and permanently break the spirit, has it not a naturaltendency to produce retaliatory pride and contempt? We reimburseourselves for cuffs and toil by a double dose of self-esteem. No one ismore likely to be arrogant than a lately freed slave.

I write, of course, only to neutral readers. With the wholeheartedadherents of the system there is no arguing, for, as we have alreadyseen, they have maxims and logic which the lay mind cannot apprehend. Ihave even heard them defend compulsory games on the ground that all boys"except a few rotters" like the games; they have to be compulsorybecause no compulsion is needed. (I wish I had never heard chaplains inthe Armed Forces produce a similar argument in defence of the wickedinstitution of Church Parades.)

But the essential evil of public school life, as I see it, did not lieeither in the sufferings of the fa*gs or in the privileged arrogance ofthe Bloods. These were symptoms of something more all-pervasive,something which, in the long run, did most harm to the boys whosucceeded best at school and were happiest there. Spiritually speaking,the deadly thing was that school life was a life almost wholly dominatedby the social struggle; to get on, to arrive, or, having reached thetop, to remain there, was the absorbing preoccupation. It is often, ofcourse, the preoccupation of adult life as well; but I have not yet seenany adult society in which the surrender to this impulse was so total.And from it, at school as in the world, all sorts of meanness flow; thesycophancy that courts those higher in the scale, the cultivation ofthose whom it is well to know, the speedy abandonment of friendshipsthat will not help on the upward path, the readiness to join the cryagainst the unpopular, the secret motive in almost every action. TheWyvernians seem to me in retrospect to have been the least spontaneous,in that sense the least boyish, society I have ever known. It wouldperhaps not be too much to say that in some boys' lives everything wascalculated to the great end of advancement. For this games were played;for this clothes, friends, amusem*nts, and vices were chosen.

And that is why I cannot give pederasty anything like a first placeamong the evils of the Coll. There is much hypocrisy on this theme.People commonly talk as if every other evil were more tolerable thanthis. But why? Because those of us who do not share the vice feel for ita certain nausea, as we do, say, for necrophily? I think that of verylittle relevance to moral judgement. Because it produces permanentperversion? But there is very little evidence that it does. The Bloodswould have preferred girls to boys if they could have come by them;when, at a later age, girls were obtainable, they probably took them. Isit then on Christian grounds? But how many of those who fulminate on thematter are in fact Christians? And what Christian, in a society soworldly and cruel as that of Wyvern, would pick out the carnal sins forspecial reprobation? Cruelty is surely more evil than lust and the Worldat least as dangerous as the Flesh. The real reason for all the potheris, in my opinion, neither Christian nor ethical. We attack this vicenot because it is the worst but because it is, by adult standards, themost disreputable and unmentionable, and happens also to be a crime inEnglish law. The World will lead you only to Hell; but sodomy may leadyou to jail and create a scandal, and lose you your job. The World, todo it justice, seldom does that.

If those of us who have known a school like Wyvern dared to speak thetruth, we should have to say that pederasty, however great an evil initself, was, in that time and place, the only foothold or cranny leftfor certain good things. It was the only counterpoise to the socialstruggle; the one oasis (though green only with weeds and moist onlywith foetid water) in the burning desert of competitive ambition. In hisunnatural love-affairs, and perhaps only there, the Blood went a littleout of himself, forgot for a few hours that he was One of the MostImportant People There Are. It softens the picture. A perversion was theonly chink left through which something spontaneous and uncalculatingcould creep in. Plato was right after all. Eros, turned upside down,blackened, distorted, and filthy, still bore the traces of his divinity.

What an answer, by the by, Wyvern was to those who derive all the illsof society from economics! For money had nothing to do with its classsystem. It was not (thank Heaven) the boys with threadbare coats whobecame Punts, nor the boys with plenty of pocket-money who becameBloods. According to some theorists, therefore, it ought to have beenentirely free from bourgeois vulgarities and iniquities. Yet I have everseen a community so competitive, so full of snobbery and flunkeyism, aruling class so selfish and so class-conscious, or a proletariat sofawning, so lacking in all solidarity and sense of corporate honour. Butperhaps one hardly needs to cite experience for a truth so obvious apriori. As Aristotle remarked, men do not become dictators in order tokeep warm. If a ruling class has some other source of strength, why needit bother about money? Most of what it wants will be pressed upon it byemulous flatterers; the rest can be taken by force.

There were two blessings at Wyvern that wore no disguise; one of themwas my form master, Smewgy as we called him. I spell the name so as toinsure the right pronunciation--the first syllable should rhyme exactlywith Fugue--though the Wyvernian spelling was "Smugy".

Except at Oldie's I had been fortunate in my teachers ever since I wasborn; but Smewgy was "beyond expectation, beyond hope". He was agrey-head with large spectacles and a wide mouth which combined to givehim a froglike expression, but nothing could be less froglike than hisvoice. He was honey-tongued. Every verse he read turned into music onhis lips: something midway between speech and song. It is not the onlygood way of reading verse, but it is the way to enchant boys; moredramatic and less rhythmical ways can be learned later. He first taughtme the right sensuality of poetry, how it should be savoured and mouthedin solitude. Of Milton's "Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues,Powers" he said, "That line made me happy for a week." It was not thesort of thing I had heard anyone say before. Nor had I ever met beforeperfect courtesy in a teacher. It had nothing to do with softness;Smewgy could be very severe, but it was the severity of a judge, weightyand measured, without taunting--

He never yet no vileinye ne sayde
In all his lyf unto no maner wight.

He had a difficult team to drive, for our form consisted partly ofyoungsters, New Bugs with scholarships, starting there like myself, andpartly of veterans who had arrived there at the end of their slowjourney up the school. He made us a unity by his good manners. He alwaysaddressed us as "gentlemen" and the possibility of behaving otherwiseseemed thus to be ruled out from the beginning; and in that room atleast the distinction between fa*gs and Bloods never raised its head. Ona hot day, when he had given us permission to remove our coats, he askedour permission before removing his gown. Once for bad work I was sent byhim to the Headmaster to be threatened and rated. The Headmastermisunderstood Smewgy's report and thought there had been some complaintabout my manners. Afterward Smewgy got wind of the Head's actual wordsand at once corrected the mistake, drawing me aside and saying, "Therehas been some curious misunderstanding. I said nothing of the sort aboutyou. You will have to be whipped if you don't do better at your GreekGrammar next week, but naturally that has nothing to do with yourmanners or mine." The idea that the tone of conversation between onegentleman and another should be altered by a flogging (any more than bya duel) was ridiculous. His manner was perfect: no familiarity, nohostility, no threadbare humour; mutual respect; decorum. "Never let uslive with amousia," was one of his favourite maxims: amousia, theabsence of the Muses. And he knew, as Spenser knew, that courtesy was ofthe Muses.

Thus, even had he taught us nothing else, to be in Smewgy's form was tobe in a measure ennobled. Amidst all the banal ambition and flashysplendours of school life he stood as a permanent reminder of thingsmore gracious, more humane, larger and cooler. But his teaching, in thenarrower sense, was equally good. He could enchant but he could alsoanalyse. An idiom or a textual crux, once expounded by Smewgy, becameclear as day. He made us feel that the scholar's demand for accuracy wasnot merely pedantic, still less an arbitrary moral discipline, butrather a niceness, a delicacy, to lack which argued "a gross andswainish disposition". I began to see that the reader who missessyntactical points in a poem is missing aesthetic points as well.

In those days a boy on the classical side officially did almost nothingbut classics. I think this was wise; the greatest service we can do toeducation to-day is to teach fewer subjects. No one has time to do morethan a very few things well before he is twenty, and when we force a boyto be a mediocrity in a dozen subjects we destroy his standards, perhapsfor life. Smewgy taught us Latin and Greek, but everything else came inincidentally. The books I liked best under his teaching were Horace'sOdes, Aeneid IV, and Euripides' Bacchae. I had always in one sense"liked" my classical work, but hitherto this had only been the pleasurethat everyone feels in mastering a craft. Now I tasted the classics aspoetry. Euripides' picture of Dionysus was closely linked in my mindwith the whole mood of Mr. Stephens' Crock of Gold, which I had latelyread for the first time with great excitement. Here was something verydifferent from the Northernness. Pan and Dionysus lacked the cold,piercing appeal of Odin and Frey. A new quality entered my imagination:something Mediterranean and volcanic, the orgiastic drum-beat.Orgiastic, but not, or not strongly, erotic. It was perhapsunconsciously connected with my growing hatred of the public schoolorthodoxies and conventions, my desire to break and tear it all.

The other undisguised blessing of the Coll was "the Gurney", the schoollibrary; not only because it was a library, but because it wassanctuary. As the negro used to become free on touching English soil, sothe meanest boy was "unfa*ggable" once he was inside the Gurney. It wasnot, of course, easy to get there. In the winter terms if you were noton the list for "Clubs" you had to go out for a run. In summer you couldreach sanctuary of an afternoon only under favourable conditions. Youmight be put down for Clubs, and that excluded you. Or there might beeither a House match or a Coll match which you were compelled to watch.Thirdly, and most probably, on your way to the Gurney you might becaught and fa*gged for the whole afternoon. But sometimes one succeededin running the gauntlet of all these dangers; and then--books, silence,leisure, the distant sound of bat and ball ("Oh the brave music of adistant drum"), bees buzzing at the open windows, and freedom. In theGurney I found Corpus Poeticum Boreale and tried, vainly but happily,to hammer out the originals from the translation at the bottom of thepage. There too I found Milton, and Yeats, and a book on Celticmythology, which soon became, if not a rival, yet a humble companion, toNorse. That did me good; to enjoy two mythologies (or three, now that Ihad begun to love the Greek), fully aware of their differing flavours,is a balancing thing, and makes for catholicity. I felt keenly thedifference between the stony and fiery sublimity of Asgard, the green,leafy, amorous, and elusive world of Cruachan and the Red Branch andTir-nan-Og, the harder, more defiant, sun-bright beauty of Olympus. Ibegan (presumably in the holidays) an epic on Cuchulain and another onFinn, in English hexameters and in fourteeners respectively. Luckilythey were abandoned before these easy and vulgar metres had time tospoil my ear.

But the Northernness still came first and the only work I completed atthis time was a tragedy, Norse in subject and Greek in form. It wascalled Loki Bound and was as classical as any Humanist could havedesired, with Prologos, Parodos, Epeisodia, Stasima, Exodos,Stichomythia, and (of course) one passage in trochaic septenarii--withrhyme. I never enjoyed anything more. The content is significant. MyLoki was not merely malicious. He was against Odin because Odin hadcreated a world though Loki had clearly warned him that this was awanton cruelty. Why should creatures have the burden of existence forcedon them without their consent? The main contrast in my play was betweenthe sad wisdom of Loki and the brutal orthodoxy of Thor. Odin was partlysympathetic; he could at least see what Loki meant and there had beenold friendship between those two before cosmic politics forced themapart. Thor was the real villain, Thor with his hammer and his threats,who was always egging Odin on against Loki and always complaining thatLoki did not sufficiently respect the major gods; to which Loki replied

I pay respect to wisdom not to strength.

Thor was, in fact, the symbol of the Bloods; though I see that moreclearly now than I did at the time. Loki was a projection of myself; hevoiced that sense of priggish superiority whereby I was, unfortunately,beginning to compensate myself for my unhappiness.

The other feature in Loki Bound which may be worth commenting on isthe pessimism. I was at this time living, like so many Atheists orAntitheists, in a whirl of contradictions. I maintained that God did notexist. I was also very angry with God for not existing. I was equallyangry with Him for creating a world.

How far was this pessimism, this desire not to have been, sincere? Well,I must confess that this desire quite slipped out of my mind during theseconds when I was covered by the wild Earl's revolver. By theChestertonian test, then, the test of Manalive, it was not sincere atall. But I am still not convinced by Chesterton's argument. It is truethat when a pessimist's life is threatened he behaves like other men;his impulse to preserve life is stronger than his judgement that life isnot worth preserving. But how does this prove that the judgement wasinsincere or even erroneous? A man's judgement that whisky is bad forhim is not invalidated by the fact that when the bottle is at hand hefinds desire stronger than reason and succumbs. Having once tasted life,we are subjected to the impulse of self-preservation. Life, in otherwords, is as habit-forming as cocaine. What then? If I still heldcreation to be "a great injustice" I should hold that this impulse toretain life aggravates the injustice. If it is bad to be forced to drinkthe potion, how does it mend matters that the potion turns out to be anaddiction drug? Pessimism cannot be answered so. Thinking as I thenthought about the universe, I was reasonable in condemning it. At thesame time I now see that my view was closely connected with a certainlop-sidedness of temperament. I had always been more violent in mynegative than in my positive demands. Thus, in personal relations, Icould forgive much neglect more easily than the least degree of what Iregarded as interference. At table I could forgive much insipidity in myfood more easily than the least suspicion of what seemed to me excessiveor inappropriate seasoning. In the course of life I could put up withany amount of monotony far more patiently than even the smallestdisturbance, bother, bustle, or what the Scotch call kurfuffle. Neverat any age did I clamour to be amused; always and at all ages (where Idared) I hotly demanded not to be interrupted. The pessimism, orcowardice, which would prefer non-existence itself to even the mildestunhappiness was thus merely the generalisation of all thesepusillanimous preferences. And it remains true that I have, almost allmy life, been quite unable to feel that horror of nonentity, ofannihilation, which, say, Dr. Johnson felt so strongly. I felt it forthe very first time only in 1947. But that was after I had long beenre-converted and thus begun to know what life really is and what wouldhave been lost by missing it.

VIII. Release

As Fortune is wont, at her chosen hour,
Whether she sends us solace or sore,
The wight to whom she shows her power
Will find that he gets still more and more.
PEARL

A few chapters ago I warned the reader that the return of Joy hadintroduced into my life a duality which makes it difficult to narrate.Reading through what I have just written about Wyvern, I find myselfexclaiming, "Lies, lies! This was really a period of ecstasy. Itconsisted chiefly of moments when you were too happy to speak, when thegods and heroes rioted through your head, when satyrs danced and Maenadsroared on the mountains, when Brynhild and Sieglinde, Deirdre, Maeve andHelen were all about you, till sometimes you felt that it might breakyou with mere richness." And all that is true. There were moreLeprechauns than fa*gs in that House. I have seen the victories ofCuchulain more often than those of the first eleven. Was Borage the Headof the Coll? or was it Conachar MacNessa? And the world itself--can Ihave been unhappy, living in Paradise? What keen, tingling sunlightthere was! The mere smells were enough to make a man tipsy--cut grass,dew-dabbled mosses, sweet pea, autumn woods, wood burning, peat, saltwater. The sense ached. I was sick with desire; that sickness betterthan health. All this is true, but it does not make the other version alie. I am telling a story of two lives. They have nothing to do witheach other: oil and vinegar, a river running beside a canal, Jekyll andHyde. Fix your eye on either and it claims to be the sole truth. When Iremember my outer life I see clearly that the other is but momentaryflashes, seconds of gold scattered in months of dross, each instantlyswallowed up in the old, familiar, sordid, hopeless weariness. When Iremember my inner life I see that everything mentioned in the last twochapters was merely a coarse curtain which at any moment might be drawnaside to reveal all the heavens I then knew. The same duality perplexesthe story of my home life, to which I must now turn.

Once my brother had left Wyvern and I had gone to it, the classic periodof our boyhood was at an end. Something not so good succeeded it, butthis had long been prepared by slow development within the classic ageitself. All began, as I have said, with the fact that our father was outof the house from nine in the morning till six at night. From the veryfirst we built up for ourselves a life that excluded him. He on his partdemanded a confidence even more boundless, perhaps, than a fatherusually, or wisely, demands. One instance of this, early in my life, hadfar reaching effects. Once when I was at Oldie's and had just begun totry to live as a Christian I wrote out a set of rules for myself and putthem in my pocket. On the first day of the holidays, noticing that mypockets bulged with all sorts of papers and that my coat was beingpulled out of all shape, he plucked out the whole pile of rubbish andbegan to go through it. Boylike, I would have died rather than let himsee my list of good resolutions. I managed to keep them out of his reachand get them into the fire. I do not see that either of us was to blame;but never from that moment until the hour of his death did I enter hishouse without first going through my own pockets and removing anythingthat I wished to keep private.

A habit of concealment was thus bred before I had anything guilty toconceal. By now I had plenty. And even what I had no wish to hide Icould not tell. To have told him what Wyvern or even Chartres was reallylike would have been risky (he might write to the Headmaster) andintolerably embarrassing. It would also have been impossible; and here Imust touch on one of his strangest characteristics.

My father--but these words, at the head of a paragraph, will carry thereader's mind inevitably to Tristram Shandy. On second thoughts I amcontent that they should. It is only in a Shandean spirit that my mattercan be approached. I have to describe something as odd and whimsical asever entered the brain of Sterne; and if I could, I would gladly leadyou to the same affection for my father as you have for Tristram's. Andnow for the thing itself. You will have grasped that my father was nofool. He had even a streak of genius in him. At the same time hehad--when seated in his own arm chair after a heavy mid-day dinner on anAugust afternoon with all the windows shut--more power of confusing anissue or taking up a fact wrongly than any man I have ever known. As aresult it was impossible to drive into his head any of the realities ofour school life, after which (nevertheless) he repeatedly enquired. Thefirst and simplest barrier to communication was that, having earnestlyasked, he did not "stay for an answer" or forgot it the moment it wasuttered. Some facts must have been asked for and told him, on a moderatecomputation, once a week, and were received by him each time as perfectnovelties. But this was the simplest barrier. Far more often he retainedsomething, but something very unlike what you had said. His mind sobubbled over with humour, sentiment, and indignation that, long beforehe had understood or even listened to your words, some accidental hinthad set his imagination to work, he had produced his own version of thefacts, and believed that he was getting it from you. As he invariablygot proper names wrong (no name seemed to him less probable thananother) his textus receptus was often almost unrecognisable. Tell himthat a boy called Churchwood had caught a fieldmouse and kept it as apet, and a year, or ten years later, he would ask you, "Did you everhear what became of poor Chickweed who was so afraid of the rats?" Forhis own version, once adopted, was indelible, and attempts to correct itonly produced an incredulous "Hm! Well, that's not the story you usedto tell." Sometimes, indeed, he took in the facts you had stated; buttruth fared none the better for that. What are facts withoutinterpretation? It was axiomatic to my father (in theory) that nothingwas said or done from an obvious motive. Hence he who in his real lifewas the most honourable and impulsive of men, and the easiest victimthat any knave or impostor could hope to meet, became a positiveMachiavel when he knitted his brows and applied to the behaviour ofpeople he had never seen the spectral and labyrinthine operation whichhe called "reading between the lines". Once embarked upon that, he mightmake his landfill anywhere in the wide world: and always with unshakableconviction. "I see it all"--"I understand it perfectly"--"It's as plain asa pikestaff," he would say; and then, as we soon learned, he wouldbelieve till his dying day in some deadly quarrel, some slight, somesecret sorrow or some immensely complex machination, which was not onlyimprobable but impossible. Dissent on our part was attributed, withkindly laughter, to our innocence, gullibility, and general ignorance oflife. And besides all these confusions, there were the sheer nonsequiturs when the ground seemed to open at one's feet. "DidShakespeare spell his name with an E at the end?" asked my brother. "Ibelieve," said I--but my father interrupted: "I very much doubt if heused the Italian calligraphy at all." A certain church in Belfast hasboth a Greek inscription over the door and a curious tower. "That churchis a great landmark," said I, "I can pick it out from all sorts ofplaces--even from the top of Cave Hill." "Such nonsense," said my father,"how could you make out Greek letters three or four miles away?"

One conversation, held several years later, may be recorded as aspecimen of these continual cross-purposes. My brother had been speakingof a re-union dinner for the officers of the Nth Division which he hadlately attended. "I suppose your friend Collins was there," said myfather.

B. Collins? Oh no. He wasn't in the Nth, you know.

F. (After a pause.) Did these fellows not like Collins then?

B. I don't quite understand. What fellows?

F. The Johnnies that got up the dinner.

B. Oh no, not at all. It was nothing to do with liking or not liking.You see, it was a purely Divisional affair. There'd be no question ofasking anyone who hadn't been in the Nth.

F. (After a long pause.) Hm! Well, I'm sure poor Collins was very muchhurt.

There are situations in which the very genius of Filial Piety would findit difficult not to let some sign of impatience escape him.

I would not commit the sin of Ham. Nor would I, as historian, reduce acomplex character to a false simplicity. The man who, in his armchair,sometimes appeared not so much incapable of understanding anything asdetermined to misunderstand everything, was formidable in the policecourt and, I presume, efficient in his office. He was a humorist, even,on occasion, a wit. When he was dying, the pretty nurse, rallying him,said, "What an old pessimist you are! You're just like my father." "Isuppose," replied her patient, "he has several daughters."

The hours my father spent at home were thus hours of perplexity for usboys. After an evening of the sort of conversation I have beendescribing one felt as if one's head were spinning like a top. Hispresence put an end to all our innocent as well as to all our forbiddenoccupations. It is a hard thing--nay, a wicked thing--when a man is feltto be an intruder in his own house. And yet, as Johnson said, "Sensationis sensation." I am sure it was not his fault, I believe much of it wasours; what is certain is that I increasingly found it oppressive to bewith him. One of his most amiable qualities helped to make it so. I havesaid before that he "conned no state"; except during his Philippics hetreated us as equals. The theory was that we lived together more likethree brothers than like a father and two sons. That, I say, was thetheory. But of course it was not and could not be so; indeed ought notto have been so. That relation cannot really exist between schoolboysand a middle-aged man of overwhelming personality and of habits utterlyunlike theirs. And the pretence that it does ends by putting a curiousstrain on the juniors. Chesterton has laid his finger on the weak pointof all such factitious equality: "If a boy's aunts are his pals, will itnot soon follow that a boy needs no pals but his aunts?" That was not,of course, the question for us; we wanted no pals. But we did wantliberty, if only liberty to walk about the house. And my father's theorythat we were three boys together actually meant that while he was athome we were as closely bound to his presence as if the three of us hadbeen chained together; and all our habits were frustrated. Thus if myfather came home unexpectedly at midday, having allowed himself an extrahalf-holiday, he might, if it were summer, find us with chairs and booksin the garden. An austere parent, of the formal school, would have gonein to his own adult occupations. Not so my father. Sitting in thegarden? An excellent idea. But would not all three of us be better onthe summer-seat? Thither, after he had assumed one of his "light springovercoats", we would go. (I do not know how many overcoats he had; I amstill wearing two of them.) After sitting for a few minutes, thus clad,on a shadeless seat where the noonday sun was blistering the paint, henot unnaturally began to perspire. "I don't know what you two think," hewould say, "but I'm finding this almost too hot. What about movingindoors?" That meant an adjournment to the study, where even thesmallest chink of open window was rather grudgingly allowed. I say"allowed", but there was no question of authority. In theory, everythingwas decided by the general Will. "Liberty Hall, boys, Liberty Hall," ashe delighted to quote. "What time would you like lunch?" But we knewonly too well that the meal which would otherwise have been at one hadalready been shifted, in obedience to his lifelong preference, to two oreven two-thirty; and that the cold meats which we liked had already beenwithdrawn in favour of the only food our father ever voluntarily ate--hotbutcher's meat, boiled, stewed or roast... and this to be eaten inmid-afternoon in a dining-room that faced south. For the whole of therest of the day, whether sitting or walking, we were inseparable; andthe speech (you see that it could hardly be called conversation), thespeech with its cross-purposes, with its tone (inevitably) always set byhim, continued intermittently till bedtime. I should be worse than a dogif I blamed my lonely father for thus desiring the friendship of hissons; or even if the miserable return I made him did not to this day lieheavy on my conscience. But "sensation is sensation". It wasextraordinarily tiring. And in my own contributions to these endlesstalks--which were indeed too adult for me, too anecdotal, tooprevailingly jocular--I was increasingly aware of an artificiality. Theanecdotes were, indeed, admirable in their kind: business stories,Mahaffy stories (many of which I found attached to Jowett at Oxford),stories of ingenious swindles, social blunders, police-court "drunks".But I was acting when I responded to them. Drollery, whimsicality, thekind of humour that borders on the fantastic, was my line. I had to act.My father's geniality and my own furtive disobediences both helped todrive me into hypocrisy. I could not "be myself" while he was at home.God forgive me, I thought Monday morning, when he went back to his work,the brightest jewel in the week.

Such was the situation which developed during the classic period. Now,when I had gone to Wyvern and my brother to a tutor to prepare forSandhurst, there came a change. My brother had liked Wyvern as much as Iloathed it. There were many reasons for this: his more adaptable temper,his face which bore no such smack-inviting signature as mine, but mostof all the fact that he had gone there straight from Oldie's and I froma preparatory school where I had been happy. No school in England butwould have appeared a heaven on earth after Oldie's. Thus in one of hisfirst letters from Wyvern my brother communicated the startling factthat you could really eat as much (or as little) as you wanted at table.To a boy fresh from the school at Belsen, this alone would haveoutweighed almost everything else. But by the time I went to Wyvern Ihad learned to take decent feeding for granted. And now a terrible thinghappened. My reaction to Wyvern was perhaps the first greatdisappointment my brother had ever experienced. Loving the place as hedid, he had looked forward to the days when this too could be sharedbetween us--an idem sentire about Wyvern succeeding an idem sentireabout Boxen. Instead he heard, from me, blasphemies against all hisgods; from Wyvern, that his young brother looked like becoming a CollPunt. The immemorial league between us was strained, all but broken.

All this was cruelly complicated by the fact that relations between myfather and my brother were never before or since so bad as at this time;and Wyvern was behind that too. My brother's reports had grown worse andworse; and the tutor to whom he had now been sent confirmed them to theextent of saying that he seemed to have learned almost nothing atschool. Nor was that all. Sentences savagely underlined in my father'scopy of The Lanchester Tradition reveal his thoughts. They arepassages about a certain glazed insolence, an elaborate, heartlessflippancy, which the reforming Headmaster in that story encountered inthe Bloods of the school he wished to reform. That was how my fatherenvisaged my brother at this period: flippant, languid, emptied of theintellectual interests which had appeared in his earlier boyhood,immovable, indifferent to all real values, and urgent in his demand fora motor-bicycle.

It was, of course, to turn us into public-school boys that my father hadoriginally sent us to Wyvern; the finished product appalled him. It is afamiliar tragi-comedy and you can study it in Lockhart; Scott labouredhard to make his son a hussar, but when the actual hussar was presentedto him, Scott sometimes forgot the illusion of being an aristocrat andbecame once more a respectable Edinburgh lawyer with strong views aboutPuppyism. So in our family. Mispronunciation was one of my father'sfavourite rhetorical weapons. He now always sounded the first syllableof Wyvern wrongly. I can still hear him growl, "Wyvernian affectation."In proportion as my brother's tone became languid and urbanely weary, somy father's voice became more richly and energetically Irish, and allmanner of strange music from his boyhood in Cork and Dublin forced itsway up through the more recent Belfastian crust.

During these miserable debates I occupied a most unfortunate position.To have been on my father's side and against my brother I should havehad to unmake myself; it was a state of parties outside my wholephilosophy of domestic politics. It was all very disagreeable.

Yet out of this "unpleasantness" (a favourite word of my father's) theresprang what I still reckon, by merely natural standards, the mostfortunate thing that ever happened to me. The tutor (in Surrey) to whommy brother had been sent was one of my father's oldest friends. He hadbeen headmaster of Lurgan when my father was a boy there. In asurprisingly short time he so re-built and extended the ruins of mybrother's education that he not only passed into Sandhurst but wasplaced among those very few candidates at the top of the list whor*ceived prize cadetships. I do not think my father ever did justice tomy brother's achievement; it came at a time when the gulf between themwas too wide, and when they were friends again it had become ancienthistory. But he saw very clearly what it proved about the exceptionalpowers of his teacher. At the same time, he was almost as sick as I ofthe very name of Wyvern. And I never ceased, by letter and by word ofmouth, to beg that I might be taken away. All these factors urged him tothe decision which he now made. Might it not after all be best to giveme my desire? to have done with school for good and send me also toSurrey to read for the University with Mr. Kirkpatrick? He did not formthis plan without much doubt and hesitation. He did his best to put allthe risks before me: the dangers of solitude, the sudden change from thelife and bustle of a great school (which change I might not like so muchas I anticipated), the possibly deadening effect of living with only anold man and his old wife for company. Should I really be happy with nocompanions of my own age? I tried to look very grave at these questions.But it was all imposture. My heart laughed. Happy without other boys?Happy without toothache, without chilblains, happy without pebbles in myshoes? And so the arrangement was made. If it had had nothing else torecommend it, the mere thought, "Never, never, never, shall I have toplay games again," was enough to transport me. If you want to know how Ifelt, imagine your own feelings on waking one morning to find thatincome tax or unrequited love had somehow vanished from the world.

I should be sorry if I were understood to think, or if I encouraged anyreader in thinking, that this invincible dislike of doing things with abat or a ball were other than a misfortune. Not, indeed, that I allow togames any of the moral and almost mystical virtue which schoolmastersclaim for them; they seem to me to lead to ambition, jealousy, andembittered partisan feeling, quite as often as to anything else. Yet notto like them is a misfortune, because it cuts you off from companionshipwith many excellent people who can be approached in no other way. Amisfortune, not a vice; for it is involuntary. I had tried to like gamesand failed. That impulse had been left out of my make-up; I was togames, as the proverb has it, like an ass to the harp.

It is a curious truth, noticed by many writers, that good fortune isnearly always followed by more good fortune, and bad, by more bad. Aboutthe same time that my Father decided to send me to Mr. Kirkpatrick,another great good came to me. Many chapters ago I mentioned a boy wholived near us and who had tried, quite unsuccessfully, to make friendswith my brother and myself. His name was Arthur and he was my brother'sexact contemporary; he and I had been at Campbell together though wenever met. I think it was shortly before the beginning of my last termat Wyvern that I received a message saying that Arthur was in bed,convalescent, and would welcome a visit. I can't remember what led me toaccept this invitation, but for some reason I did.

I found Arthur sitting up in bed. On the table beside him lay a copy ofMyths of the Norsem*n.

"Do you like that?" said I.

"Do you like that?" said he.

Next moment the book was in our hands, our heads were bent closetogether, we were pointing, quoting, talking--soon almostshouting--discovering in a torrent of questions that we liked not onlythe same thing, but the same parts of it and in the same way; that bothknew the stab of Joy and that, for both, the arrow was shot from theNorth. Many thousands of people have had the experience of finding thefirst friend, and it is none the less a wonder; as great a wonder(pace the novelists) as first love, or even a greater. I had been sofar from thinking such a friend possible that I had never even longedfor one; no more than I longed to be King of England. If I had foundthat Arthur had independently built up an exact replica of the Boxonianworld I should not really have been much more surprised. Nothing, Isuspect, is more astonishing in any man's life than the discovery thatthere do exist people very, very like himself.

During my last few weeks at Wyvern strange stories began to appear inthe papers, for this was the summer of 1914. I remember how a friend andI puzzled over a column that bore the headline "Can England keep out ofit?" "Keep out of it?" said he, "I don't see how she can get into it."Memory paints the last hours of that term in slightly apocalypticcolours, and perhaps memory lies. Or perhaps for me it was apocalypticenough to know that I was leaving, to see all those hated things for thelast time; yet not simply (at that moment) to hate them. There is a"rumness", a ghostliness, about even a Windsor chair when it says, "Youwill not see me again." Early in the holidays we declared war. Mybrother, then on leave from Sandhurst, was recalled. Some weeks later Iwent to Mr. Kirkpatrick at Great Bookham in Surrey.

IX. The Great Knock

You will often meet with characters in nature so extravagant that adiscreet poet would not venture to set them upon the stage.
LORD CHESTERFIELD

On a September day, having crossed to Liverpool and reached London, Imade my way to Waterloo and ran down to Great Bookham. I had been toldthat Surrey was "suburban", and the landscape that actually flitted pastthe windows astonished me. I saw steep little hills, watered valleys,and wooded commons which ranked by my Wyvernian and Irish standards asforests; bracken everywhere; a world of red and russet and yellowishgreens. Even the sprinkling of suburban villas (much rarer then thannow) delighted me. These timbered and red-tiled houses, embosomed intrees, were wholly unlike the stuccoed monstrosities which formed thesuburbs of Belfast. Where I had expected gravel drives and iron gatesand interminable laurels and monkey puzzlers, I saw crooked pathsrunning up or down hill from wicket gates, between fruit trees andbirches. By a severer taste than mine these houses would all be mockedperhaps; yet I cannot help thinking that those who designed them andtheir gardens achieved their object, which was to suggest Happiness.They filled me with a desire for that domesticity which, in its fulldevelopment, I had never known; they set one thinking of tea trays.

At Bookham I was met by my new teacher--"Kirk" or "Knock" or the GreatKnock as my father, my brother, and I all called him. We had heard abouthim all our lives and I therefore had a very clear impression of what Iwas in for. I came prepared to endure a perpetual luke-warm shower bathof sentimentality. That was the price I was ready to pay for theinfinite blessedness of escaping school; but a heavy price. One story ofmy father's, in particular, gave me the most embarrassing forebodings.He had loved to tell how once at Lurgan, when he was in some kind oftrouble or difficulty, the Old Knock, or the dear Old Knock, had drawnhim aside and there "quietly and naturally" slid his arm round him andrubbed his dear old whiskers against my father's youthful cheek andwhispered a few words of comfort.... And here was Bookham at last,and there was the arch-sentimentalist himself waiting to meet me.

He was over six feet tall, very shabbily dressed (like a gardener, Ithought), lean as a rake, and immensely muscular. His wrinkled faceseemed to consist entirely of muscles, so far as it was visible; for hewore moustache and side whiskers with a clean-shaven chin like theEmperor Franz Joseph. The whiskers, you will understand, concerned mevery much at that moment. My cheek already tingled in anticipation.Would he begin at once? There would be tears for certain; perhaps worsethings. It is one of my lifelong weaknesses that I never could endurethe embrace or kiss of my own sex. (An unmanly weakness, by the way;Aeneas, Beowulf, Roland, Launcelot, Johnson, and Nelson knew nothing ofit.)

Apparently, however, the old man was holding his fire. We shook hands,and though his grip was like iron pincers it was not lingering. A fewminutes later we were walking away from the station.

"You are now," said Kirk, "proceeding along the principal artery betweenGreat and Little Bookham."

I stole a glance at him. Was this geographical exordium a heavy joke? Orwas he trying to conceal his emotions? His face, however, showed only aninflexible gravity. I began to "make conversation" in the deplorablemanner which I had acquired at those evening parties and indeed foundincreasingly necessary to use with my father. I said I was surprised atthe "scenery" of Surrey; it was much "wilder" than I had expected.

"Stop!" shouted Kirk with a suddenness that made me jump. "What do youmean by wildness and what grounds had you for not expecting it?"

I replied I don't know what, still "making conversation". As answerafter answer was torn to shreds it at last dawned upon me that he reallywanted to know. He was not making conversation, nor joking, nor snubbingme; he wanted to know. I was stung into attempting a real answer. A fewpasses sufficed to show that I had no clear and distinct ideacorresponding to the word "wildness", and that, in so far as I had anyidea at all, "wildness" was a singularly inept word. "Do you not see,then," concluded the Great Knock, "that your remark was meaningless?" Iprepared to sulk a little, assuming that the subject would now bedropped. Never was I more mistaken in my life. Having analysed my terms,Kirk was proceeding to deal with my proposition as a whole. On what hadI based (but he pronounced it baized) my expectations about the Floraand Geology of Surrey? Was it maps, or photographs, or books? I couldproduce none. It had, heaven help me, never occurred to me that what Icalled my thoughts needed to be "baized" on anything. Kirk once moredrew a conclusion--without the slightest sign of emotion, but equallywithout the slightest concession to what I thought good manners: "Do younot see, then, that you had no right to have any opinion whatever on thesubject?"

By this time our acquaintance had lasted about three and a half minutes;but the tone set by this first conversation was preserved without asingle break during all the years I spent at Bookham. Anything moregrotesquely unlike the "dear Old Knock" of my father's reminiscencescould not be conceived. Knowing my father's invariable intention ofveracity and also knowing what strange transformations every truthunderwent when once it entered his mind, I am sure he did not mean todeceive us. But if Kirk at any time of his life took a boy aside andthere "quietly and naturally" rubbed the boy's face with his whiskers, Ishall as easily believe that he sometimes varied the treatment byquietly and naturally standing on his venerable and egg-bald head.

If ever a man came near to being a purely logical entity, that man wasKirk. Born a little later, he would have been a Logical Positivist. Theidea that human beings should exercise their vocal organs for anypurpose except that of communicating or discovering truth was to himpreposterous. The most casual remark was taken as a summons todisputation. I soon came to know the differing values of his threeopenings. The loud cry of "Stop!" was flung in to arrest a torrent ofverbiage which could not be endured a moment longer; not because itfretted his patience (he never thought of that) but because it waswasting time, darkening counsel. The hastier and quieter "Excuse!" (i.e."Excuse me") ushered in a correction or distinction merely parentheticaland betokened that, thus set right, your remark might still, withoutabsurdity, be allowed to reach completion. The most encouraging of allwas, "I hear you." This meant that your remark was significant and onlyrequired refutation; it had risen to the dignity of error. Refutation(when we got so far) always followed the same lines. Had I read this?Had I studied that? Had I any statistical evidence? Had I any evidencein my own experience? And so to the almost inevitable conclusion, "Doyou not see then that you had no right, etc."

Some boys would not have liked it; to me it was red beef and strongbeer. I had taken it for granted that my leisure hours at Bookham wouldbe passed in "grown-up conversation". And that, as you know already, Ihad no taste for. In my experience it meant conversation about politics,money, deaths, and digestion. I assumed that a taste for it, as foreating mustard or reading newspapers, would develop in me when I grewolder (so far, all three expectations have been disappointed). The onlytwo kinds of talk I wanted were the almost purely imaginative and thealmost purely rational; such talk as I had about Boxen with my brotheror about Valhalla with Arthur, on the one hand, or such talk as I hadhad with my uncle Gussie about astronomy on the other. I could neverhave gone far in any science because on the path of every science thelion Mathematics lies in wait for you. Even in Mathematics, whatevercould be done by mere reasoning (as in simple geometry) I did withdelight; but the moment calculation came in I was helpless. I graspedthe principles but my answers were always wrong. Yet though I couldnever have been a scientist, I had scientific as well as imaginativeimpulses, and I loved ratiocination. Kirk excited and satisfied one sideof me. Here was talk that was really about something. Here was a man whothought not about you but about what you said. No doubt I snorted andbridled a little at some of my tossings; but, taking it all in all, Iloved the treatment. After being knocked down sufficiently often I beganto know a few guards and blows, and to put on intellectual muscle. Inthe end, unless I flatter myself, I became a not contemptible sparringpartner. It was a great day when the man who had so long been engaged inexposing my vagueness at last cautioned me against the dangers ofexcessive subtlety.

If Kirk's ruthless dialectic had been merely a pedagogic instrument Imight have resented it. But he knew no other way of talking. No age orsex was spared the elenchus. It was a continuous astonishment to himthat anyone should not desire to be clarified or corrected. When a verydignified neighbour, in the course of a Sunday call, observed with anair of finality, "Well, well, Mr. Kirkpatrick, it takes all sorts tomake a world. You are a Liberal and I am a Conservative; we naturallylook at the facts from different angles," Kirk replied, "What do youmean? Are you asking me to picture Liberals and Conservatives playingpeep-bo at a rectangular Fact from opposite sides of a table?" If anunwary visitor, hoping to waive a subject, observed, "Of course, I knowopinions differ----" Kirk would raise both his hands and exclaim, "Goodheavens! I have no opinions on any subject whatsoever." A favouritemaxim was, "You can have enlightenment for ninepence but you preferignorance." The commonest metaphors would be questioned till some bittertruth had been forced from its hiding place. "These fiendish Germanatrocities----" "But are not fiends a figment of the imagination?"--"Verywell, then; these brutal atrocities----" "But none of the brutes doesanything of the kind!"--"Well, what am I to call them?" "Is it not plainthat we must call them simply Human?" What excited his supremecontempt was the conversation of other Headmasters, which he hadsometimes had to endure at conferences when he himself was Head ofLurgan. "They would come and ask me, 'What attitude do you adopt to aboy who does so-and-so?' Good Heavens! As if I ever adopted an attitudeto anybody or anything!" Sometimes, but rarely, he was driven to irony.On such occasions his voice became even weightier than usual and onlythe distention of his nostrils betrayed the secret to those who knewhim. It was in such fashion that he produced his dictum, "The Masterof Balliol is one of the most important beings in the universe."

It will be imagined that Mrs. Kirkpatrick led a somewhat uneasy life:witness the occasion on which her husband by some strange error foundhimself in the drawing-room at the beginning of what his lady hadintended to be a bridge party. About half an hour later she was observedto leave the room with a remarkable expression on her face; and manyhours later still the Great Knock was discovered sitting on a stool inthe midst of seven elderly ladies ("ful drery was hire chere") beggingthem to clarify their terms.

I have said that he was almost wholly logical; but not quite. He hadbeen a Presbyterian and was now an Atheist. He spent Sunday, as he spentmost of his time on week-days, working in his garden. But one curioustrait from his Presbyterian youth survived. He always, on Sundays,gardened in a different, and slightly more respectable, suit. An UlsterScot may come to disbelieve in God, but not to wear his week-day clotheson the Sabbath.

Having said that he was an Atheist, I hasten to add that he was a"Rationalist" of the old, high and dry nineteenth-century type. ForAtheism has come down in the world since those days, and mixed itselfwith politics and learned to dabble in dirt. The anonymous donor who nowsends me anti-God magazines hopes, no doubt, to hurt the Christian inme; he really hurts the ex-Atheist. I am ashamed that my old mates and(which matters much more) Kirk's old mates should have sunk to what theyare now. It was different then; even McCabe wrote like a man. At thetime when I knew him, the fuel of Kirk's Atheism was chiefly of theanthropological and pessimistic kind. He was great on The Golden Boughand Schopenhauer.

The reader will remember that my own Atheism and Pessimism were fullyformed before I went to Bookham. What I got there was merely freshammunition for the defence of a position already chosen. Even this I gotindirectly from the tone of his mind or independently from reading hisbooks. He never attacked religion in my presence. It is the sort of factthat no one would infer from an outside knowledge of my life, but it isa fact.

I arrived at Gastons (so the Knock's home was called) on a Saturday, andhe announced that we would begin Homer on Monday. I explained that I hadnever read a word in any dialect but the Attic, assuming that when heknew this he would approach Homer through some preliminary lessons onthe Epic language. He replied merely with a sound very frequent in hisconversation which I can only spell "Huh". I found this ratherdisquieting; and I woke on Monday saying to myself, "Now for Homer.Golly!" The name struck awe into my soul. At nine o'clock we sat down towork in the little upstairs study which soon became so familiar to me.It contained a sofa (on which we sat side by side when he was workingwith me), a table and chair (which I used when I was alone), a bookcase,a gas stove, and a framed photograph of Mr. Gladstone. We opened ourbooks at Iliad, Book I. Without a word of introduction Knock readaloud the first twenty lines or so in the "new" pronunciation, which Ihad never heard before. Like Smewgy, he was a chanter; less mellow invoice, yet his frill gutturals and rolling R's and more varied vowelsseemed to suit the bronze-age epic as well as Smewgy's honey tongue hadsuited Horace. For Kirk, even after years of residence in England, spokethe purest Ulster. He then translated, with a few, a very fewexplanations, about a hundred lines. I had never seen a classical authortaken in such large gulps before. When he had finished he handed me overCrusius' Lexicon and, having told me to go through again as much as Icould of what he had done, left the room. It seems an odd method ofteaching, but it worked. At first I could travel only a very short wayalong the trail he had blazed, but every day I could travel further.Presently I could travel the whole way. Then I could go a line or twobeyond his furthest North. Then it became a kind of game to see how farbeyond. He appeared at this stage to value speed more than absoluteaccuracy. The great gain was that I very soon became able to understanda great deal without (even mentally) translating it; I was beginning tothink in Greek. That is the great Rubicon to cross in learning anylanguage. Those in whom the Greek word lives only while they are huntingfor it in the lexicon, and who then substitute the English word for it,are not reading the Greek at all; they are only solving a puzzle. Thevery formula, "Naus means a ship," is wrong. Naus and ship bothmean a thing, they do not mean one another. Behind Naus, as behindnavis or naca, we want to have a picture of a dark, slender masswith sail or oars, climbing the ridges, with no officious English wordintruding.

We now settled into a routine which has ever since served in my mind asan archtype, so that what I still mean when I speak of a "normal" day(and lament that normal days are so rare) is a day of the Bookhampattern. For if I could please myself I would always live as I livedthere. I would choose always to breakfast at exactly eight and to be atmy desk by nine, there to read or write till one. If a cup of good teaor coffee could be brought me about eleven, so much the better. A stepor so out of doors for a pint of beer would not do quite so well; for aman does not want to drink alone and if you meet a friend in thetap-room the break is likely to be extended beyond its ten minutes. Atone precisely lunch should be on the table; and by two at the latest Iwould be on the road. Not, except at rare intervals, with a friend.Walking and talking are two very great pleasures, but it is a mistake tocombine them. Our own noise blots out the sounds and silences of theout-door world; and talking leads almost inevitably to smoking, and thenfarewell to nature as far as one of our senses is concerned. The onlyfriend to walk with is one (such as I found, during the holidays, inArthur) who so exactly shares your taste for each mood of thecountryside that a glance, a halt, or at most a nudge, is enough toassure us that the pleasure is shared. The return from the walk, and thearrival of tea, should be exactly coincident, and not later than aquarter past four. Tea should be taken in solitude, as I took it atBookham on those (happily numerous) occasions when Mrs. Kirkpatrick wasout; the Knock himself disdained this meal. For eating and reading aretwo pleasures that combine admirably. Of course not all books aresuitable for meal-time reading. It would be a kind of blasphemy to readpoetry at table. What one wants is a gossipy, formless book which can beopened anywhere. The ones I learned so to use at Bookham were Boswell,and a translation of Herodotus, and Lang's History of EnglishLiterature. Tristram Shandy, Elia and the Anatomy of Melancholyare all good for the same purpose. At five a man should be at workagain, and at it till seven. Then, at the evening meal and after, comesthe time for talk, or, failing that, for lighter reading; and unless youare making a night of it with your cronies (and at Bookham I had none)there is no reason why you should ever be in bed later than eleven. Butwhen is a man to write his letters? You forget that I am describing thehappy life I led with Kirk or the ideal life I would live now if Icould. And it is an essential of the happy life that a man would havealmost no mail and never dread the postman's knock. In those blesseddays I received, and answered, only two letters a week; one from myfather, which was a matter of duty, and one from Arthur which was thehigh light of the week, for we poured out to each other on paper all thedelight that was intoxicating us both. Letters from my brother, now onactive service, were longer and rarer, and so were my replies.

Such is my ideal, and such then (almost) was the reality, of "settled,calm, Epicurean life". It is no doubt for my own good that I have beenso generally prevented from leading it, for it is a life almost entirelyselfish. Selfish, not self centred: for in such a life my mind would bedirected towards a thousand things, not one of which is myself. Thedistinction is not unimportant. One of the happiest men and mostpleasing companions I have ever known was intensely selfish. On theother hand I have known people capable of real sacrifice whose liveswere nevertheless a misery to themselves and to others, becauseself-concern and self-pity filled all their thoughts. Either conditionwill destroy the soul in the end. But till the end, give me the man whotakes the best of everything (even at my expense) and then talks ofother things, rather than the man who serves me and talks of himself,and whose very kindnesses are a continual reproach, a continual demandfor pity, gratitude, and admiration.

Kirk did not, of course, make me read nothing but Homer. The Two GreatBores (Demosthenes and Cicero) could not be avoided. There were (ohglory!) Lucretius, Catullus, Tacitus, Herodotus. There was Virgil, forwhom I still had no true taste. There were Greek and Latin compositions.(It is a strange thing that I have contrived to reach my late fiftieswithout ever reading one word of Caesar.) There were Euripides,Sophocles, Aeschylus. In the evenings there was French with Mrs.Kirkpatrick, treated much as her husband treated Homer. We got through agreat many good novels in this way and I was soon buying French books onmy own. I had hoped there would be English essays, but whether becausehe felt he could not endure mine or because he soon guessed that I wasalready only too proficient in that art (which he almost certainlydespised) Kirk never set me one. For the first week or so he gave medirections about my English reading, but when he discovered that, leftto myself, I was not likely to waste my time, he gave me absolutefreedom. Later in my career we branched out into German and Italian.Here his methods were the same. After the very briefest contact withGrammars and Exercises I was plunged into Faust and the Inferno. InItalian we succeeded. In German I have little doubt that we shouldequally have succeeded if I had stayed with him a little longer. But Ileft too soon and my German has remained all my life that of aschoolboy. Whenever I have set about rectifying this, some other andmore urgent task has always interrupted me.

But Homer came first. Day after day and month after month we drovegloriously onward, tearing the whole Achilleid out of the Iliad andtossing the rest on one side, and then reading the Odyssey entire,till the music of the thing and the clear, bitter brightness that livesin almost every formula had become part of me. Of course my appreciationwas very romanticised--the appreciation of a boy soaked in WilliamMorris. But this slight error saved me from that far deeper error of"classicism" with which the Humanists have hoodwinked half the world. Icannot therefore deeply regret the days when I called Circe a"wise-wife" and every marriage a "high-tide". That has all burned itselfout and left no snuff, and I can now enjoy the Odyssey in a maturerway. The wanderings mean as much as ever they did; the great moment of"eucatastrophe" (as Professor Tolkien would call it) when Odysseusstrips off his rags and bends the bow, means more; and perhaps what nowpleases me best of all is those exquisite, Charlotte M. Yonge familiesat Pylos and elsewhere. How rightly Sir Maurice Powicke says, "Therehave been civilised people in all ages." And let us add, "In all agesthey have been surrounded by barbarism."

Meanwhile, on afternoons and on Sundays, Surrey lay open to me. CountyDown in the holidays and Surrey in the term--it was an excellentcontrast. Perhaps, since their beauties were such that even a fool couldnot force them into competition, this cured me once and for all of thepernicious tendency to compare and to prefer--an operation that doeslittle good even when we are dealing with works of art and endless harmwhen we are dealing with nature. Total surrender is the first steptowards the fruition of either. Shut your mouth; open your eyes andears. Take in what is there and give no thought to what might have beenthere or what is somewhere else. That can come later, if it must come atall. (And notice here how the true training for anything whatever thatis good always prefigures and, if submitted to, will always help us in,the true training for the Christian life. That is a school where theycan always use your previous work whatever subject it was on.) Whatdelighted me in Surrey was its intricacy. My Irish walks commanded largehorizons and the general lie of land and sea could be taken in at aglance; I will try to speak of them later. But in Surrey the contourswere so tortuous, the little valleys so narrow, there was so muchtimber, so many villages concealed in woods or hollows, so many fieldpaths, sunk lanes, dingles, copses, such an unpredictable variety ofcottage, farmhouse, villa, and country seat, that the whole thing couldnever lie clearly in my mind, and to walk in it daily gave one the samesort of pleasure that there is in the labyrinthine complexity of Maloryor the Faerie Queene. Even where the prospect was tolerably open, aswhen I sat looking down on the Leatherhead and Dorking valley fromPolesdan Lacey, it always lacked the classic comprehensibility of theWyvern landscape. The valley twisted away southward into another valley,a train thudded past invisible in a wooded cutting, the opposite ridgeconcealed its bays and promontories. This, even on a summer morning. ButI remember more dearly autumn afternoons in bottoms that lay intenselysilent under old and great trees, and especially the moment, near FridayStreet, when our party (that time I was not alone) suddenly discovered,from recognising a curiously shaped stump, that we had travelled roundin a circle for the last half-hour; or one frosty sunset over the Hog'sBack at Guildford. On a Saturday afternoon in winter, when nose andfingers might be pinched enough to give an added relish to theanticipation of tea and fireside, and the whole week-end's reading layahead, I suppose I reached as much happiness as is ever to be reached onearth. And especially if there were some new, long-coveted book awaitingme.

For I had forgotten. When I spoke of the post I forgot to tell you thatit brought parcels as well as letters. Every man of my age has had inhis youth one blessing for which our juniors may well envy him: we grewup in a world of cheap and abundant books. Your Everyman was then abare shilling, and, what is more, always in stock; your World'sClassic, Muses' Library, Home University Library, Temple Classic,Nelson's French series, Bohn, and Longman's Pocket Library, atproportionate prices. All the money I could spare went in postal ordersto Messrs. Denny of the Strand. No days, even at Bookham, were happierthan those on which the afternoon post brought me a neat little parcelin dark grey paper. Milton, Spenser, Malory, The High History of theHoly Grail, the Laxdale Saga, Ronsard, Chénier, Voltaire, Beowulfand Gawain and the Green Knight (both in translations), Apuleius, theKalevala, Herrick, Walton, Sir John Mandeville, Sidney's Arcadia,and nearly all of Morris, came volume by volume into my hands. Some ofmy purchases proved disappointments and some went beyond my hopes, butthe undoing of the parcel always remained a delicious moment. On my rarevisits to London I looked at Messrs. Denny in the Strand with a kind ofawe; so much pleasure had come from it.

Smewgy and Kirk were my two greatest teachers. Roughly, one might say(in medieval language) that Smewgy taught me Grammar and Rhetoric andKirk taught me Dialectic. Each had, and gave me, what the other lacked.Kirk had none of Smewgy's graciousness or delicacy, and Smewgy had lesshumour than Kirk. It was a saturnine humour. Indeed he was very likeSaturn--not the dispossessed King of Italian legend, but grim old Cronos,Father Time himself with scythe and hour-glass. The bitterest, and alsofunniest, things came out when he had risen abruptly from table (alwaysbefore the rest of us) and stood ferreting in a villainous old tobaccojar on the mantelpiece for the dottles of former pipes which it was hisfrugal habit to use again. My debt to him is very great, my reverence tothis day undiminished.

X. Fortune's Smile

The fields, the floods, the heavens, with one consent
Did seeme to laugh on me, and favour mine intent.
SPENSER

At the same time that I exchanged Wyvern for Bookham I also exchanged mybrother for Arthur as my chief companion. My brother, as you know, wasserving in France. From 1914 to 1916, which is the Bookham period, hebecomes a figure that at rare intervals appears unpredicted on leave, inall the glory of a young officer, with what then seemed unlimited wealthat his command, and whisks me off to Ireland. Luxuries hitherto unknownto me, such as first-class railway carriages and sleeping cars, glorifythese journeys. You will understand that I had been crossing the Irishsea six times a year since I was nine. My brother's leaves now oftenadded journeys extraordinary. That is why my memory is stored withship's-side images to a degree unusual for such an untravelled man. Ihave only to close my eyes to see if I choose, and sometimes whether Ichoose or no, the phosphorescence of a ship's wash, the mast unmovingagainst the stars though the water is rushing past us, the longsalmon-coloured rifts of dawn or sunset on the horizon of coldgrey-green water, or the astonishing behaviour of land as you approachit, the promontories that walk out to meet you, the complex movementsand final disappearance of the mountains further inland.

These leaves were of course a great delight. The strains that had beendeveloping (thanks to Wyvern) before my brother went to France wereforgotten. There was a tacit determination on both sides to revive, forthe short time allowed us, the classic period of our boyhood. As mybrother was in the R.A.S.C., which in those days was reckoned a safeplace to be, we did not feel that degree of anxiety about him which mostfamilies were suffering at this time. There may have been more anxietyin the unconscious than came out in fully waking thought. That, atleast, would explain an experience I had, certainly once, and perhapsmore often; not a belief, nor quite a dream, but an impression, a mentalimage, a haunting, which on a bitter winter night at Bookham representedmy brother hanging about the garden and calling--or rather trying tocall, but as in Virgil's Hell inceptus clamor frustratur hiantem, abat's cry is all that comes. There hung over this image an atmospherewhich I dislike as much as any I ever breathed, a blend of the macabreand the weakly, wretchedly, hopelessly pathetic--the dreary miasma of thePagan Hades.

Though my friendship with Arthur began from an identity of taste on aparticular point, we were sufficiently different to help one another.His home-life was almost the opposite of mine. His parents were membersof the Plymouth Brothers, and he was the youngest of a large family; hishome, nevertheless, was almost as silent as ours was noisy. He was atthis time working in the business of one of his brothers, but his healthwas delicate and after an illness or two he was withdrawn from it. Hewas a man of more than one talent: a pianist and, in hope, a composer,and also a painter. One of our earliest schemes was that he should makean operatic score for Loki Bound--a project which, of course, after anextremely short and happy life, died a painless death. In literature heinfluenced me more, or more permanently, than I did him. His greatdefect was that he cared very little for verse. Something I did to mendthis, but less than I wished. He, on the other hand, side by side withhis love for myth and marvel, which I fully shared, had another tastewhich I lacked till I met him and with which, to my great good, heinfected me for life. This was the taste for what he called "the good,solid, old books", the classic English novelists. It is astonishing howI had avoided them before I met Arthur. I had been persuaded by myfather to read The Newcomes when I was rather too young for it andnever tried Thackeray again till I was at Oxford. He is stillantipathetic to me, not because he preaches but because he preachesbadly. Dickens I looked upon with a feeling of horror, engendered bylong poring over the illustrations before I had learned to read. I stillthink them depraved. Here, as in Walt Disney, it is not the ugliness ofthe ugly figures but the simpering dolls intended for our sympathy whichreally betray the secret (not that Walt Disney is not far superior tothe illustrators of Dickens). Of Scott I knew only a few of themedieval, that is, the weakest, novels. Under Arthur's influence I readat this time all the best Waverleys, all the Brontës, and all the JaneAustens. They provided an admirable complement to my more fantasticreading, and each was the more enjoyed for its contrast to the other.The very qualities which had previously deterred me from such booksArthur taught me to see as their charm. What I would have called their"stodginess" or "ordinariness" he called "Homeliness"--a key word in hisimagination. He did not mean merely Domesticity, though that came intoit. He meant the rooted quality which attaches them to all our simpleexperiences, to weather, food, the family, the neighbourhood. He couldget endless enjoyment out of the opening sentence of Jane Eyre, orthat other opening sentence in one of Hans Andersen's stories, "How itdid rain, to be sure." The mere word "beck" in the Brontës was a feastto him; and so were the schoolroom and kitchen scenes. This love of the"Homely" was not confined to literature; he looked for it in out-of-doorscenes as well and taught me to do the same.

Hitherto my feelings for nature had been too narrowly romantic. Iattended almost entirely to what I thought awe-inspiring, or wild, oreerie, and above all to distance. Hence mountains and clouds were myespecial delight; the sky was, and still is, to me one of the principalelements in any landscape, and long before I had seen them all named andsorted out in Modern Painters I was very attentive to the differentqualities, and different heights, of the cirrus, the cumulus, and therain-cloud. As for the Earth, the country I grew up in had everything toencourage a romantic bent, had indeed done so ever since I first lookedat the unattainable Green Hills through the nursery window. For thereader who knows those parts it will be enough to say that my main hauntwas the Holywood Hills-the irregular polygon you would have described ifyou drew a line from Stormont to Comber, from Comber to Newtownards,from Newtownards to Scrabo, from Scrabo to Craigantlet, from Craigantletto Holywood, and thence through Knocknagonney back to Stormont. How tosuggest it all to a foreigner I hardly know.

First of all, it is by Southern English standards bleak. The woods, forwe have a few, are of small trees, rowan and birch and small fir. Thefields are small, divided by ditches with ragged sea-nipped hedges ontop of them. There is a good deal of gorse and many outcroppings ofrock. Small abandoned quarries, filled with cold-looking water, aresurprisingly numerous. There is nearly always a wind whistling throughthe grass. Where you see a man ploughing there will be gulls followinghim and pecking at the furrow. There are no field-paths or rights ofway, but that does not matter for everyone knows you--or if they do notknow you, they know your kind and understand that you will shut gatesand not walk over crops. Mushrooms are still felt to be common property,like the air. The soil has none of the rich chocolate or ochre you findin parts of England: it is pale--what Dyson calls "the ancient, bitterearth". But the grass is soft, rich, and sweet, and the cottages, alwayswhitewashed and single storeyed and roofed with blue slate, light up thewhole landscape.

Although these hills are not very high, the expanse seen from them ishuge and various. Stand at the north-eastern extremity where the slopesgo steeply down to Holywood. Beneath you is the whole expanse of theLough. The Antrim coast twists sharply to the north and out of sight;green, and humble in comparison, Down curves away southward. Between thetwo the Lough merges into the sea, and if you look carefully on a goodday you can even see Scotland, phantom-like on the horizon. Now comefurther to the south and west. Take your stand at the isolated cottagewhich is visible from my father's house and overlooks our whole suburb,and which everyone calls The Shepherd's Hut, though we are not really ashepherd country. You are still looking down on the Lough, but its mouthand the sea are now hidden by the shoulder you have just come from, andit might (for all you see) be a landlocked lake. And here we come to oneof those great contrasts which have bitten deeply into my mind--Niflheimand Asgard, Britain and Logres, Handramit and Harandra, air and ether,the low world and the high. Your horizon from here is the AntrimMountains, probably a uniform mass of greyish blue, though if it is asunny day you may just trace on the Cave Hill the distinction betweenthe green slopes that climb two-thirds of the way to the summit and thecliff wall that perpendicularly accomplishes the rest. That is onebeauty; and here where you stand is another, quite different and evenmore dearly loved--sunlight and grass and dew, crowing co*cks and gagglingducks. In between them, on the flat floor of the Valley at your feet, aforest of factory chimneys, gantries, and giant cranes rising out of awelter of mist, lies Belfast. Noises come up from it continually,whining and screeching of trams, clatter of horse traffic on unevensets, and, dominating all else, the continual throb and stammer of thegreat shipyards. And because we have heard this all our lives it doesnot, for us, violate the peace of the hill-top; rather, it emphasisesit, enriches the contrast, sharpens the dualism. Down in that "smoke andstir" is the hated office to which Arthur, less fortunate than I, mustreturn to-morrow: for it is only one of his rare holidays that allows usto stand here together on a weekday morning. And down there too are thebarefoot old women, the drunken men stumbling in and out of the "spiritgrocers" (Ireland's horrible substitute for the kindly English "pub"),the straining, overdriven horses, the hard-faced rich women--all theworld which Alberich created when he cursed love and twisted the goldinto a ring.

Now step a little way--only two fields and across a lane and up to thetop of the bank on the far side--and you will see, looking south with alittle east in it, a different world. And having seen it, blame me ifyou can for being a romantic. For here is the thing itself, utterlyirresistible, the way to the world's end, the land of longing, thebreaking and blessing of hearts. You are looking across what may becalled, in a certain sense, the plain of Down, and seeing beyond it theMourne Mountains.

It was K.--that is, Cousin Quartus' second daughter, the Valkyrie--whofirst expounded to me what this plain of Down is really like. Here isthe recipe for imagining it. Take a number of medium-sized potatoes andlay them down (one layer of them only) in a flat-bottomed tin basin. Nowshake loose earth over them till the potatoes themselves, but not theshape of them, is hidden; and of course the crevices between them willnow be depressions of earth. Now magnify the whole thing till thosecrevices are large enough to conceal each its stream and its huddle oftrees. And then, for colouring, change your brown earth into thechequered pattern of fields, always small fields (a couple of acreseach), with all their normal variety of crop, grass, and plough. Youhave now got a picture of the "plain" of Down, which is a plain only inthis sense that if you were a very large giant you would regard it aslevel but very ill to walk on--like cobbles. And now remember that everycottage is white. The whole expanse laughs with these little white dots;it is like nothing so much as the assembly of white foam-caps when afresh breeze is on a summer sea. And the roads are white too; there isno tarmac yet. And because the whole country is a turbulent democracy oflittle hills, these roads shoot in every direction, disappearing andreappearing. But you must not spread over this landscape your hardEnglish sunlight; make it paler, make it softer, blur the edges of thewhite cumuli, cover it with watery gleams, deepening it, making allunsubstantial. And beyond all this, so remote that they seemfantastically abrupt, at the very limit of your vision, imagine themountains. They are no stragglers. They are steep and compact andpointed and toothed and jagged. They seem to have nothing to do with thelittle hills and cottages that divide you from them. And sometimes theyare blue, sometimes violet; but quite often they look transparent--as ifhuge sheets of gauze had been cut out into mountainous shapes and hungup there, so that you could see through them the light of the invisiblesea at their backs.

I number it among my blessings that my father had no car, while yet mostof my friends had, and sometimes took me for a drive. This meant thatall these distant objects could be visited just enough to clothe themwith memories and not impossible desires, while yet they remainedordinarily as inaccessible as the Moon. The deadly power of rushingabout wherever I pleased had not been given me. I measured distances bythe standard of man, man walking on his two feet, not by the standard ofthe internal combustion engine. I had not been allowed to deflower thevery idea of distance; in return I possessed "infinite riches" in whatwould have been to motorists "a little room". The truest and mosthorrible claim made for modern transport is that it "annihilates space".It does. It annihilates one of the most glorious gifts we have beengiven. It is a vile inflation which lowers the value of distance, sothat a modern boy travels a hundred miles with less sense of liberationand pilgrimage and adventure than his grandfather got from travellingten. Of course if a man hates space and wants it to be annihilated, thatis another matter. Why not creep into his coffin at once? There islittle enough space there.

Such were my outdoor delights before I met Arthur, and all these heshared and confirmed. And in his search for the Homely he taught me tosee other things as well. But for him I should never have known thebeauty of the ordinary vegetables that we destine to the pot. "Drills,"he used to say. "Just ordinary drills of cabbages--what can be better?"And he was right. Often he recalled my eyes from the horizon just tolook through a hole in a hedge, to see nothing more than a farmyard inits mid-morning solitude, and perhaps a grey cat squeezing its way undera barn door, or a bent old woman with a wrinkled, motherly face comingback with an empty bucket from the pigstye. But best of all we liked itwhen the Homely and the unhomely met in sharp juxtaposition; if a littlekitchen garden ran steeply up a narrowing enclave of fertile groundsurrounded by outcroppings and furze, or some shivering quarry poolunder a moonrise could be seen on our left, and on our right the smokingchimney and lamplit window of a cottage that was just settling down forthe night.

Meanwhile, on the continent, the unskilled butchery of the first GermanWar went on. As it did so and as I began to foresee that it wouldprobably last till I reached military age, I was compelled to make adecision which the law had taken out of the hands of English boys of myown age; for in Ireland we had no conscription. I did not much plumemyself even then for deciding to serve, but I did feel that the decisionabsolved me from taking any further notice of the war. For Arthur, whoseheart hopelessly disqualified him, there was no such question.Accordingly I put the war on one side to a degree which some people willthink shameful and some incredible. Others will call it a flight fromreality. I maintain that it was rather a treaty with reality, the fixingof a frontier. I said to my country, in effect, "You shall have me on acertain date, not before. I will die in your wars if need be, but tillthen I shall live my own life. You may have my body, but not my mind. Iwill take part in battles but not read about them." If this attitudeneeds excusing I must say that a boy who is unhappy at school inevitablylearns the habit of keeping the future in its place; if once he began toallow infiltrations from the coming term into the present holidays hewould despair. Also, the Hamilton in me was always on guard against theLewis; I had seen enough of the self-torturing temperament.

No doubt, even if the attitude was right, the quality in me which madeit so easy to adopt is somewhat repellent. Yet, even so, I can hardlyregret having escaped the appalling waste of time and spirit which wouldhave been involved in reading the war news or taking more than anartificial and formal part in conversations about the war. To readwithout military knowledge or good maps accounts of fighting which weredistorted before they reached the Divisional general and furtherdistorted before they left him and then "written up" out of allrecognition by journalists, to strive to master what will becontradicted the next day, to fear and hope intensely on shaky evidence,is surely an ill use of the mind. Even in peacetime I think those arevery wrong who say that schoolboys should be encouraged to read thenewspapers. Nearly all that a boy reads there in his teens will be knownbefore he is twenty to have been false in emphasis and interpretation,if not in fact as well, and most of it will have lost all importance.Most of what he remembers he will therefore have to unlearn; and he willprobably have acquired an incurable taste for vulgarity andsensationalism and the fatal habit of fluttering from paragraph toparagraph to learn how an actress has been divorced in California, atrain derailed in France, and quadruplets born in New Zealand.

I was now happier than I had ever been. All the sting had been drawnfrom the beginning of term. Yet the homecoming at its end remainedalmost as joyful as before. The holidays grew better and better. Ourgrown-up friends, and especially my cousins at Mountbracken, now seemedless grown up--for one's immediate elders grow downwards or backwards tomeet one at that age. There were many merry meetings, much good talk. Idiscovered that other people besides Arthur loved books that I loved.The horrible old "social functions", the dances, were at an end, for myfather now allowed me to refuse the invitations. All my engagements werenow pleasant ones, within a small circle of people who were allintermarried, or very old neighbours, or (the women anyway) oldschool-fellows. I am shy of mentioning them. Of Mountbracken I have hadto speak because the story of my life could not be told without it;beyond that I hesitate to go. Praise of one's friends is nearimpertinence. I cannot tell you here of Janie M. nor of her mother, norof Bill and Mrs. Bill. In novels, provincial-suburban society is usuallypainted grey to black. I have not found it so. I think we Strandtown andBelmont people had among us as much kindness, wit, beauty, and taste asany circle of the same size that I have ever known.

At home the real separation and apparent cordiality between my fatherand myself continued. Every holidays I came back from Kirk with mythoughts and my speech a little clearer, and this made it progressivelyless possible to have any real conversation with my father. I was fartoo young and raw to appreciate the other side of the account, to weighthe rich (if vague) fertility, the generosity and humour of my father'smind against the dryness, the rather death-like lucidity, of Kirk's.With the cruelty of youth I allowed myself to be irritated by traits inmy father which, in other elderly men, I have since regarded as lovablefoibles. There were so many unbridgeable misunderstandings. Once Ireceived a letter from my brother in my father's presence which heimmediately demanded to see. He objected to some expressions in it abouta third person. In defence of them I pleaded that they had not beenaddressed to him. "What nonsense!" answered my father. "He knew youwould show me the letter, and intended you to show me the letter." Inreality, as I well knew, my brother had foolishly gambled on the chancethat it would arrive when my father was out. But this my father couldnot conceive. He was not overriding by authority a claim to privacywhich he disallowed; he could not imagine anyone making such a claim.

My relations to my father help to explain (I am not suggesting that theyexcuse) one of the worst acts of my life. I allowed myself to beprepared for confirmation, and confirmed, and to make my firstCommunion, in total disbelief, acting a part, eating and drinking my owncondemnation. As Johnson points out, where courage is not, no othervirtue can survive except by accident. Cowardice drove me into hypocrisyand hypocrisy into blasphemy. It is true that I did not and could notthen know the real nature of the thing I was doing: but I knew very wellthat I was acting a lie with the greatest possible solemnity. It seemedto me impossible to tell my father my real views. Not that he would havestormed and thundered like the traditional orthodox parent. On thecontrary, he would (at first) have responded with the greatest kindness."Let's talk the whole thing over," he would have said. But it would havebeen quite impossible to drive into his head my real position. Thethread would have been lost almost at once, and the answer implicit inall the quotations, anecdotes, and reminiscences which would have pouredover me would have been one I then valued not a straw--the beauty of theAuthorised Version, the beauty of the Christian tradition and sentimentand character. And later, when this failed, when I still tried to makemy exact points clear, there would have been anger between us, thunderfrom him and a thin, peevish rattle from me. Nor could the subject, onceraised, ever have been dropped again. All this, of course, ought to havebeen dared rather than the thing I did. But at the time it seemed to meimpossible. The Syrian captain was forgiven for bowing in the house ofRimmon. I am one of many who have bowed in the house of the real Godwhen I believed Him to be no more than Rimmon.

During the week-ends and evenings I was closely tethered to my fatherand felt this something of a hardship, since these were the times whenArthur was most often accessible. My week-days continued to supply mewith a full ration of solitude. I had, to be sure, the society of Tim,who ought to have been mentioned far sooner. Tim was our dog. He mayhold a record for longevity among Irish terriers since he was alreadywith us when I was at Oldie's and did not die till 1922. But Tim'ssociety did not amount to much. It had long since been agreed betweenhim and me that he should not be expected to accompany me on walks. Iwent a good deal further than he liked, for his shape was already thatof a bolster, or even a barrel, on four legs. Also, I went to placeswhere other dogs might be met; and though Tim was no coward (I have seenhim fight like a demon on his home ground) he hated dogs. In his walkingdays he had been known, on seeing a dog far ahead, to disappear behindthe hedge and re-emerge a hundred yards later. His mind had been formedduring our schooldays and he had perhaps learned his attitude to otherdogs from our attitude to other boys. By now he and I were less likemaster and dog than like two friendly visitors in the same hotel. We metconstantly, passed the time of day, and parted with much esteem tofollow our own paths. I think he had one friend of his own species, aneighbouring red setter; a very respectable, middle-aged dog. Perhaps agood influence; for poor Tim, though I loved him, was the mostundisciplined, unaccomplished, and dissipated-looking creature that everwent on four legs. He never exactly obeyed you; he sometimes agreed withyou.

The long hours in the empty house passed delightfully in reading andwriting. I was in the midst of the Romantics now. There was a humilityin me (as a reader) at that time which I shall never recapture. Somepoems I could not enjoy as well as others. It never occurred to me thatthese might be the inferior ones; I merely thought that I was gettingtired of my author or was not in the right mood. The longueurs ofEndymion I attributed wholly to myself. The "swoony" element in Keats'sensuality (as when Porphyro grows "faint") I tried hard to like, andfailed. I thought--though I have forgotten why--that Shelley must bebetter than Keats and was sorry I liked him less. But my great author atthis period was William Morris. I had met him first in quotation inbooks on Norse Mythology; that led me to Sigurd the Volsung. I did notreally like this as much as I tried to, and I think I now know why: themetre does not satisfy my ear. But then, in Arthur's bookcase, I foundThe Well at the World's End. I looked--I read chapter headings--Idipped--and next day I was off into town to buy a copy of my own. Like somany new steps it appeared to be partly a revival--"Knights in Armour"returning from a very early period of my childhood. After that I readall the Morris I could get, Jason, The Earthly Paradise, the proseromances. The growth of the new delight is marked by my suddenrealisation, almost with a sense of disloyalty, that the letters WILLIAMMORRIS were coming to have at least as potent a magic in them as WAGNER.

One other thing that Arthur taught me was to love the bodies of books. Ihad always respected them. My brother and I might cut up stepladderswithout scruple; to have thumb-marked or dog's-eared a book would havefilled us with shame. But Arthur did not merely respect, he wasenamoured; and soon, I too. The set up of the page, the feel and smellof the paper, the differing sounds that different papers make as youturn the leaves, became sensuous delights. This revealed to me a flaw inKirk. How often have I shuddered when he took a new classical text ofmine in his gardener's hands, bent back the boards till they creaked,and left his sign on every page.

"Yes, I remember," said my father. "That was old Knock's one fault."

"A bad one," said I.

"An all but unforgivable one," said my father.

XI. Check

When bale is at highest, boote is at next.
SIR ALDINGAR

The history of Joy, since it came riding back to me on huge waves ofWagnerian music and Norse and Celtic mythology several chapters ago,must now be brought up to date.

I have already hinted how my first delight in Valhalla and Valkyriesbegan to turn itself imperceptibly into a scholar's interest in them. Igot about as far as a boy who knew no old Germanic language could get. Icould have faced a pretty stiff examination in my subject. I would havelaughed at popular bunglers who confused the late mythological Sagaswith the classic Sagas, or the Prose with the Verse Edda, or even, morescandalously, Edda with Saga. I knew my way about the Eddaic cosmos,could locate each of the roots of the Ash and knew who ran up and downit. And only very gradually did I realise that all this was somethingquite different from the original Joy. And I went on adding detail todetail, progressing towards the moment when "I should know most andshould least enjoy". Finally I woke from building the temple to findthat the God had flown. Of course I did not put it that way. I wouldhave said simply that I didn't get the old thrill. I was in theWordsworthian predicament, lamenting that "a glory" had passed away.

Thence arose the fatal determination to recover the old thrill, and atlast the moment when I was compelled to realise that all such effortswere failures. I had no lure to which the bird would come. And now,notice my blindness. At that very moment there arose the memory of aplace and time at which I had tasted the lost Joy with unusual fullness.It had been a particular hill-walk on a morning of white mist. The othervolumes of the Ring (The Rheingold and The Valkyrie) had justarrived as a Christmas present from my father, and the thought of allthe reading before me, mixed with the coldness and loneliness of thehillside, the drops of moisture on every branch, and the distant murmurof the concealed town, had produced a longing (yet it was also fruition)which had flowed over from the mind and seemed to involve the wholebody. That walk I now remembered. It seemed to me that I had tastedheaven then. If only such a moment could return! But what I neverrealised was that it had returned--that the remembering of that walk wasitself a new experience of just the same kind. True, it was desire, notpossession. But then what I had felt on the walk had also been desire,and only possession in so far as that kind of desire is itselfdesirable, is the fullest possession we can know on earth; or rather,because the very nature of Joy makes nonsense of our common distinctionbetween having and wanting. There, to have is to want and to want is tohave. Thus, the very moment when I longed to be so stabbed again, wasitself again such a stabbing. The Desirable which had once alighted onValhalla was now alighting on a particular moment of my own past; and Iwould not recognise him there because, being an idolater and aformalist, I insisted that he ought to appear in the temple I had builthim; not knowing that he cares only for temples building and not at allfor temples built. Wordsworth, I believe, made this mistake all hislife. I am sure that all that sense of the loss of vanished vision whichfills The Prelude was itself vision of the same kind, if only he couldhave believed it.

In my scheme of thought it is not blasphemous to compare the error whichI was making with that error which the angel at the Sepulchre rebukedwhen he said to the women, "Why seek ye the living among the dead? He isnot here, He is risen." The comparison is of course between something ofinfinite moment and something very small; like comparison between theSun and the Sun's reflection in a dewdrop. Indeed, in my view, very likeit, for I do not think the resemblance between the Christian and themerely imaginative experience is accidental. I think that all things, intheir way, reflect heavenly truth, the imagination not least. "Reflect"is the important word. This lower life of the imagination is not[5]a beginning of, nor a step towards, the higher life of the spirit, merelyan image. In me, at any rate, it contained no element either of beliefor of ethics; however far pursued, it would never have made me eitherwiser or better. But it still had, at however many removes, the shape ofthe reality it reflected.

[Footnote 5]i.e. not necessarily and by its own nature. God can cause it to besuch a beginning.

If nothing else suggests this resemblance it is at least suggested bythe fact that we can make exactly the same mistakes on both levels. Youwill remember how, as a schoolboy, I had destroyed my religious life bya vicious subjectivism which made "realisations" the aim of prayer;turning away from God to seek states of mind, and trying to producethose states of mind by "maistry". With unbelievable folly I nowproceeded to make exactly the same blunder in my imaginative life; orrather the same pair of blunders. The first was made at the very momentwhen I formulated the complaint that the "old thrill" was becoming rarerand rarer. For by that complaint I smuggled in the assumption that whatI wanted was a "thrill", a state of my own mind. And there lies thedeadly error. Only when your whole attention and desire are fixed onsomething else--whether a distant mountain, or the past, or the gods ofAsgard--does the "thrill" arise. It is a by-product. Its very existencepresupposes that you desire not it but something other and outer. If byany perverse askesis or the use of any drug it could be produced fromwithin, it would at once be seen to be of no value. For take away theobject, and what, after all, would be left?--a whirl of images, afluttering sensation in the diaphragm, a momentary abstraction. And whocould want that? This, I say, is the first and deadly error, whichappears on every level of life and is equally deadly on all, turningreligion into a self-caressing luxury and love into auto-eroticism. Andthe second error is, having thus falsely made a state of mind your aim,to attempt to produce it. From the fading of the Northernness I ought tohave drawn the conclusion that the Object, the Desirable, was furtheraway, more external, less subjective, than even such a comparativelypublic and external thing as a system of mythology--had, in fact, onlyshone through that system. Instead, I concluded that it was a mood orstate within myself which might turn up in any context. To "get itagain" became my constant endeavour; while reading every poem, hearingevery piece of music, going for every walk, I stood anxious sentinel atmy own mind to watch whether the blessed moment was beginning and toendeavour to retain it if it did. Because I was still young and thewhole world of beauty was opening before me, my own officiousobstructions were often swept aside and, startled intoself-forgetfulness, I again tasted Joy. But far more often I frightenedit away by my greedy impatience to snare it, and, even when it came,instantly destroyed it by introspection, and at all times vulgarised itby my false assumption about its nature.

One thing, however, I learned, which has since saved me from manypopular confusions of mind. I came to know by experience that it is nota disguise of sexual desire. Those who think that if adolescents wereall provided with suitable mistresses we should soon hear no more of"immortal longings" are certainly wrong. I learned this mistake to be amistake by the simple, if discreditable, process of repeatedly makingit. From the Northernness one could not easily have slid into eroticfantasies without noticing the difference; but when the world of Morrisbecame the frequent medium of Joy, this transition became possible. Itwas quite easy to think that one desired those forests for the sake oftheir female inhabitants, the garden of Hesperus for the sake of hisdaughters, Hylas' river for the river nymphs. I repeatedly followed thatpath--to the end. And at the end one found pleasure; which immediatelyresulted in the discovery that pleasure (whether that pleasure or anyother) was not what you had been looking for. No moral question wasinvolved; I was at this time as nearly non-moral on that subject as ahuman creature can be. The frustration did not consist in finding a"lower" pleasure instead of a "higher". It was the irrelevance of theconclusion that marred it. The hounds had changed scent. One had caughtthe wrong quarry. You might as well offer a mutton chop to a man who isdying of thirst as offer sexual pleasure to the desire I am speaking of.I did not recoil from the erotic conclusion with chaste horror,exclaiming, "Not that!" My feelings could rather have been expressed inthe words, "Quite. I see. But haven't we wandered from the real point?"Joy is not a substitute for sex; sex is very often a substitute for Joy.I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for Joy.

Such, then, was the state of my imaginative life; over against it stoodthe life of my intellect. The two hemispheres of my mind were in thesharpest contrast. On the one side a many-islanded sea of poetry andmyth; on the other a glib and shallow "rationalism". Nearly all that Iloved I believed to be imaginary; nearly all that I believed to be realI thought grim and meaningless. The exceptions were certain people (whomI loved and believed to be real) and nature herself. That is, nature asshe appeared to the senses. I chewed endlessly on the problem: "How canit be so beautiful and also so cruel, wasteful and futile?" Hence atthis time I could almost have said with Santayana, "All that is good isimaginary; all that is real is evil." In one sense nothing less like a"flight from reality" could be conceived. I was so far from wishfulthinking that I hardly thought anything true unless it contradicted mywishes.

Hardly, but not quite. For there was one way in which the world, asKirk's rationalism taught me to see it, gratified my wishes. It might begrim and deadly but at least it was free from the Christian God. Somepeople (not all) will find it hard to understand why this seemed to mesuch an overwhelming advantage. But you must take into account both myhistory and my temperament. The period of faith which I had livedthrough at Oldie's had contained a good deal of fear. And by now,looking back on that fear, and egged on by Shaw and Voltaire andLucretius With his Tantum religio, I greatly exaggerated that elementin my memory and forgot the many other elements which had been combinedwith it. At all costs I was anxious that those full-moon-lit nights inthe dormitory should never come again. I was also, as you may remember,one whose negative demands were more violent than his positive, far moreeager to escape pain than to achieve happiness, and feeling it somethingof an outrage that I had been created without my own permission. To sucha craven the materialist's universe had the enormous attraction that itoffered you limited liabilities. No strictly infinite disaster couldovertake you in it. Death ended all. And if ever finite disasters provedgreater than one wished to bear, suicide would always be possible. Thehorror of the Christian universe was that it had no door marked Exit.It was also perhaps not unimportant that the externals of Christianitymade no appeal to my sense of beauty. Oriental imagery and style largelyrepelled me; and for the rest, Christianity was mainly associated for mewith ugly architecture, ugly music, and bad poetry. Wyvern Priory andMilton's verse were almost the only points at which Christianity andbeauty had overlapped in my experience. But, of course, what matteredmost of all was my deep-seated hatred of authority, my monstrousindividualism, my lawlessness. No word in my vocabulary expressed deeperhatred than the word Interference. But Christianity placed at thecentre what then seemed to me a transcendental Interferer. If itspicture were true then no sort of "treaty with reality" could ever bepossible. There was no region even in the innermost depth of one's soul(nay, there least of all) which one could surround with a barbed wirefence and guard with a notice No Admittance. And that was what I wanted;some area, however small, of which I could say to all other beings,"This is my business and mine only."

In this respect, and this only at first, I may have been guilty ofwishful thinking. Almost certainly I was. The materialist conceptionwould not have seemed so immensely probable to me if it had not favouredat least one of my wishes. But the difficulty of explaining even a boy'sthought entirely in terms of his wishes is that on such large questionsas these he always has wishes on both sides. Any conception of realitywhich a sane mind can admit must favour some of its wishes and frustrateothers. The materialistic universe had one great, negative attraction tooffer me. It had no other. And this had to be accepted; one had to lookout on a meaningless dance of atoms (remember, I was reading Lucretius),to realise that all the apparent beauty was a subjectivephosphorescence, and to relegate everything one valued to the world ofmirage. That price I tried loyally to pay. For I had learned somethingfrom Kirk about the honour of the intellect and the shame of voluntaryinconsistency. And, of course, I exulted with youthful and vulgar pridein what I thought my enlightenment. In argument with Arthur I was a veryswashbuckler. Most of it, as I now see, was incredibly crude and silly.I was in that state of mind in which a boy thinks it extremely tellingto call God Jahveh and Jesus Yeshua.

Looking back on my life now, I am astonished that I did not progressinto the opposite orthodoxy--did not become a Leftist, Atheist, satiricIntellectual of the type we all know so well. All the conditions seem tobe present. I had hated my public school. I hated whatever I knew orimagined of the British Empire. And though I took very little notice ofMorris's socialism (there were too many things in him that interested mefar more) continual reading of Shaw had brought it about that suchembryonic political opinions as I had were vaguely socialistic. Ruskinhad helped me in the same direction. My lifelong fear of sentimentalismought to have qualified me to become a vigorous "debunker". It is truethat I hated the Collective as much as any man can hate anything; but Icertainly did not then realise its relations to socialism. I supposethat my Romanticism was destined to divide me from the orthodoxIntellectuals as soon as I met them; and also that a mind so littlesanguine as mine about the future and about common action could onlywith great difficulty be made revolutionary.

Such, then, was my position: to care for almost nothing but the gods andheroes, the garden of the Hesperides, Launcelot and the Grail, and tobelieve in nothing but atoms and evolution and military service. Attimes the strain was severe, but I think this was a wholesome severity.Nor do I believe that the intermittent wavering in my materialistic"faith" (so to call it) which set in towards the end of the Bookhamperiod would ever have arisen simply from my wishes. It came fromanother source.

Among all the poets whom I was reading at this time (I read The FaerieQueene and The Earthly Paradise entire) there was one who stood apartfrom the rest. Yeats was this poet. I had been reading him for a longtime before I discovered the difference, and perhaps I should never havediscovered it if I had not read his prose as well: things like RosaAlchemica and Per Amica Silentia Lunae. The difference was that Yeatsbelieved. His "ever living ones" were not merely feigned or merelydesired. He really thought that there was a world of beings more or lesslike them, and that contact between that world and ours was possible. Toput it quite plainly, he believed seriously in Magic. His later careeras a poet has somewhat obscured that phase in popular estimates of him,but there is no doubt about the fact--as I learned when I met him someyears later. Here was a pretty kettle of fish. You will understand thatmy rationalism was inevitably based on what I believed to be thefindings of the sciences, and those findings, not being a scientist, Ihad to take on trust--in fact, on authority. Well, here was an oppositeauthority. If he had been a Christian I should have discounted histestimony, for I thought I had the Christians "placed" and disposed offorever. But I now learned that there were people, not traditionallyorthodox, who nevertheless rejected the whole Materialist philosophy outof hand. And I was still very ingenuous. I had no conception of theamount of nonsense written and printed in the world. I regarded Yeats asa learned, responsible writer: what he said must be worthy ofconsideration. And after Yeats I plunged into Maeterlinck; quiteinnocently and naturally since everyone was reading him at that time andsince I made a point of including a fair amount of French in my diet. InMaeterlinck I came up against Spiritualism, Theosophy, and Pantheism.Here once more was a responsible adult (and not a Christian) whobelieved in a world behind, or around, the material world. I must domyself the justice of saying that I did not give my assentcategorically. But a drop of disturbing doubt fell into my Materialism.It was merely a "Perhaps". Perhaps (oh joy!) there was, after all,"something else"; and (oh reassurance!) perhaps it had nothing to dowith Christian Theology. And as soon as I paused on that "Perhaps",inevitably all the old Occultist lore, and all the old excitement whichthe Matron at Chartres had innocently aroused in me, rose out of thepast.

Now the fat was in the fire with a vengeance. Two things hitherto widelyseparated in my mind rushed together: the imaginative longing for Joy,or rather the longing which was Joy, and the ravenous, quasi-prurientdesire for the Occult, the Preternatural as such. And with these therecame (less welcome) some stirring of unease, some of the immemorial fearwe have all known in the nursery, and (if we are honest) long after thenursery age. There is a kind of gravitation in the mind whereby goodrushes to good and evil to evil. This mingled repulsion and desire drewtowards them everything else in me that was bad. The idea that if therewere Occult knowledge it was known to very few and scorned by the manybecame an added attraction; "we few", you will remember, was anevocative expression for me. That the means should be Magic--the mostexquisitely unorthodox thing in the world, unorthodox both by Christianand by Rationalist standards--of course appealed to the rebel in me. Iwas already acquainted with the more depraved side of Romanticism; hadread Anactoria, and Wilde, and pored upon Beardsley, not hithertoattracted, but making no moral judgement. Now I thought I began to seethe point of it. In a word, you have already had in this story the Worldand the Flesh; now came the Devil. If there had been in theneighbourhood some elder person who dabbled in dirt of the Magical kind(such have a good nose for potential disciples) I might now be aSatanist or a maniac.

In actual fact I was wonderfully protected, and this spiritual debauchhad in the end one rather good result. I was protected, first, byignorance and incapacity. Whether Magic were possible or not, I at anyrate had no teacher to start me on the path. I was protected also bycowardice; the reawakened terrors of childhood might add a spice to mygreed and curiosity as long as it was daylight. Alone, and in darkness,I used my best endeavours to become a strict Materialist again; notalways with success. A "Perhaps" is quite enough for the nerves to workupon. But my best protection was the known nature of Joy. This ravenousdesire to break the bounds, to tear the curtain, to be in the secret,revealed itself, more and more clearly the longer I indulged it, to bequite different from the longing that is Joy. Its coarse strengthbetrayed it. Slowly, and with many relapses, I came to see that themagical conclusion was just as irrelevant to Joy as the eroticconclusion had been. Once again one had changed scents. If circles andpentangles and the Tetragrammaton had been tried and had in fact raised,or seemed to raise, a spirit, that might have been--if a man's nervescould stand it--extremely interesting; but the real Desirable would haveevaded one, the real Desire would have been left saying, "What is thisto me?"

What I like about experience is that it is such an honest thing. You maytake any number of wrong turnings; but keep your eyes open and you willnot be allowed to go very far before the warning signs appear. You mayhave deceived yourself, but experience is not trying to deceive you. Theuniverse rings true wherever you fairly test it.

The other results of my glance into the dark room were as follows.First, I now had both a fresh motive for wishing Materialism to be trueand a decreased confidence that it was. The fresh motive came, as youhave divined, from those fears which I had so wantonly stirred up fromtheir sleeping place in the memories of childhood; behaving like a trueLewis who will not leave well alone. Every man who is afraid of spookswill have a reason for wishing to be a Materialist; that creed promisesto exclude the bogies. As for my shaken confidence, it remained in theform of a "Perhaps", stripped of its directly and grossly magical"affect"--a pleasing possibility that the Universe might combine thesnugness of Materialism here and now with... well, with I didn't knowwhat; somewhere or something beyond, "the unimaginable lodge forsolitary thinkings". This was very bad. I was beginning to try to haveit both ways: to get the comforts both of a materialist and of aspiritual philosophy without the rigours of either. But the secondresult was better. I had learned a wholesome antipathy to everythingoccult and magical which was to stand me in good stead when, at Oxford,I came to meet Magicians, Spiritualists, and the like. Not that theravenous lust was never to tempt me again but that I now knew it for atemptation. And above all, I now knew that Joy did not point in thatdirection.

You might sum up the gains of this whole period by saying thathenceforward the Flesh and the Devil, though they could still tempt,could no longer offer me the supreme bribe. I had learned that it wasnot in their gift. And the World had never even pretended to have it.

And then, on top of this, in superabundance of mercy, came that eventwhich I have already more than once attempted to describe in otherbooks. I was in the habit of walking over to Leatherhead about once aweek and sometimes taking the train back. In summer I did so chieflybecause Leatherhead boasted a tiny swimming-bath; better than nothing tome who had learned to swim almost before I can remember and who, tillmiddle age and rheumatism crept upon me, was passionately fond of beingin water. But I went in winter, too, to look for books and to get myhair cut. The evening that I now speak of was in October. I and oneporter had the long, timbered platform of Leatherhead station toourselves. It was getting just dark enough for the smoke of an engine toglow red on the underside with the reflection of the furnace. The hillsbeyond the Dorking Valley were of a blue so intense as to be nearlyviolet and the sky was green with frost. My ears tingled with the cold.The glorious week-end of reading was before me. Turning to thebookstall, I picked out an Everyman in a dirty jacket, Phantasies, afaerie Romance, George MacDonald. Then the train came in. I can stillremember the voice of the porter calling out the village names, Saxonand sweet as a nut--"Bookham, Effingham, Horsley train". That evening Ibegan to read my new book.

The woodland journeyings in that story, the ghostly enemies, the ladiesboth good and evil, were close enough to my habitual imagery to lure meon without the perception of a change. It is as if I were carriedsleeping across the frontier, or as if I had died in the old country andcould never remember how I came alive in the new. For in one sense thenew country was exactly like the old. I met there all that had alreadycharmed me in Malory, Spenser, Morris, and Yeats. But in another senseall was changed. I did not yet know (and I was long in learning) thename of the new quality, the bright shadow, that rested on the travelsof Anodos. I do now. It was Holiness. For the first time the song of thesirens sounded like the voice of my mother or my nurse. Here were oldwives' tales; there was nothing to be proud of in enjoying them. It wasas though the voice which had called to me from the world's end were nowspeaking at my side. It was with me in the room, or in my own body, orbehind me. If it had once eluded me by its distance, it now eluded me byproximity--something too near to see, too plain to be understood, on thisside of knowledge. It seemed to have been always with me; if I couldever have turned my head quick enough I should have seized it. Now forthe first time I felt that it was out of reach not because of somethingI could not do but because of something I could not stop doing. If Icould only leave off, let go, unmake myself, it would be there.Meanwhile, in this new region all the confusions that had hithertoperplexed my search for Joy were disarmed. There was no temptation toconfuse the scenes of the tale with the light that rested upon them, orto suppose that they were put forward as realities, or even to dreamthat if they had been realities and I could reach the woods where Anodosjourneyed I should thereby come a step nearer to my desire. Yet, at thesame time, never had the wind of Joy blowing through any story been lessseparable from the story itself. Where the god and the idolon weremost nearly one there was least danger of confounding them. Thus, whenthe great moments came I did not break away from the woods and cottagesthat I read of to seek some bodiless light shining beyond them, butgradually, with a swelling continuity (like the sun at mid-morningburning through a fog) I found the light shining on those woods andcottages, and then on my own past life, and on the quiet room where Isat and on my old teacher where he nodded above his little Tacitus.For I now perceived that while the air of the new region made all myerotic and magical perversions of Joy look like sordid trumpery, it hadno such disenchanting power over the bread upon the table or the coalsin the grate. That was the marvel. Up till now each visitation of Joyhad left the common world momentarily a desert--"The first touch of theearth went nigh to kill". Even when real clouds or trees had been thematerial of the vision, they had been so only by reminding me of anotherworld; and I did not like the return to ours. But now I saw the brightshadow coming out of the book into the real world and resting there,transforming all common things and yet itself unchanged. Or, moreaccurately, I saw the common things drawn into the bright shadow. Undehoc mihi? In the depth of my disgraces, in the then invincibleignorance of my intellect, all this was given me without asking, evenwithout consent. That night my imagination was, in a certain sense,baptised; the rest of me, not unnaturally, took longer. I had not thefaintest notion what I had let myself in for by buying Phantastes.

XII. Guns and Good Company

La compagnie, de tant d'hommes vous plaist, nobles, jeunes, actifs;la liberté de cette conversation sans art, et une façon de vie masleet sans cérémonie.
MONTAIGNE

The old pattern began to repeat itself. The Bookham days, like a longerand more glorious holidays, drew to their end; a scholarship examinationand, after that, the Army, loomed behind them like a grimmer term. Thegood time had never been better than in its last months. I remember, inparticular, glorious hours of bathing in Donegal. It was surf bathing:not the formal affair with boards that you have now, but mere rough andtumble, in which the waves, the monstrous, emerald, deafening waves, arealways the winner, and it is at once a joke, a terror, and a joy to lookover your shoulder and see (too late) one breaker of such sublimeproportions that you would have avoided him had you known he was coming.But they gather themselves up, pre-eminent above their fellows, assuddenly and unpredictably as a revolution.

It was late in the winter term of 1916 that I went to Oxford to sit formy scholarship examination. Boys who have faced this ordeal inpeace-time will not easily imagine the indifference with which I went.This does not mean that I underestimated the importance (in one sense)of succeeding. I knew very well by now that there was hardly anyposition in the world save that of a don in which I was fitted to earn aliving, and that I was staking everything on a game in which few won andhundreds lost. As Kirk had said of me in a letter to my father (I didnot, of course, see it till many years later), "You may make a writer ora scholar of him, but you'll not make anything else. You may make upyour mind to that." And I knew this myself; sometimes it terrified me.What blunted the edge of it now was that whether I won a scholarship orno I should next year go into the army; and even a temper more sanguinethan mine could feel in 1916 that an infantry subaltern would be insaneto waste anxiety on anything so hypothetical as his post-war life. Ionce tried to explain this to my father; it was one of the attempts Ioften made (though doubtless less often than I ought) to break throughthe artificiality of our intercourse and admit him to my real life. Itwas a total failure. He replied at once with fatherly counsels about thenecessity of hard work and concentration, the amount that he had alreadyspent in educating me, the very moderate, nay negligible, assistance hewould be able to give me in later life. Poor man! He misjudged me sadlyif he thought that idleness at my book was among my many vices. And how,I asked myself, could he expect the winning or losing of a scholarshipto lose none of its importance when life and death were the real issues?The truth is, I think, that while death (mine, his, everyone's) wasoften vividly present to him as a subject of anxiety and other emotions,it had no place in his mind as a sober, matter-of-fact contingency fromwhich consequences could be drawn. At any rate the conversation was afailure. It shipwrecked on the old rock. His intense desire for my totalconfidence co-existed with an inability to listen (in any strict sense)to what I said. He could never empty, or silence, his own mind to makeroom for an alien thought.

My first taste of Oxford was comical enough. I had made no arrangementsabout quarters and, having no more luggage than I could carry in myhand, I sallied out of the railway station on foot to find either alodging-house or a cheap hotel; all agog for "dreaming spires" and "lastenchantments". My first disappointment at what I saw could be dealtwith. Towns always show their worst face to the railway. But as I walkedon and on I became more bewildered. Could this succession of mean shopsreally be Oxford? But I still went on, always expecting the next turn toreveal the beauties, and reflecting that it was a much larger town thanI had been led to suppose. Only when it became obvious that there wasvery little town left ahead of me, that I was, in fact, getting to opencountry, did I turn round and look. There, behind me, far away, nevermore beautiful since, was the fabled cluster of spires and towers. I hadcome out of the station on the wrong side and been all this time walkinginto what was even then the mean and sprawling suburb of Botley. I didnot see to what extent this little adventure was an allegory of my wholelife. I merely walked back to the station, somewhat footsore, took ahansom, and asked to be driven to "some place where I can get rooms fora week, please". The method, which I should now think hazardous, was acomplete success, and I was soon at tea in comfortable lodgings. Thehouse is still there, the first on the right as you turn into MansfieldRoad out of Holywell. I shared the sitting-room with another candidate,a man from Cardiff College, which he pronounced to be architecturallysuperior to anything in Oxford. His learning terrified me, but he was anagreeable man. I have never seen him since.

It was very cold and next day snow began to fall, turning pinnacles intowedding-cake decorations. The examination was held in the Hall of Oriel,and we all wrote in greatcoats and mufflers and wearing at least ourleft-hand gloves. The Provost, old Phelps, gave out the papers. Iremember very little about them, but I suppose I was outshone in pureclassics by many of my rivals and succeeded on my general knowledge anddialectics. I had the impression that I was doing badly. Long years (oryears that seemed long) with the Knock had cured me of my defensiveWyvernian priggery, and I no longer supposed other boys to be ignorantof what I knew. Thus the essay was on a quotation from Johnson. I hadread several times the Boswellian conversation in which it occurred andwas able to replace the whole question in that context; but I neverthought that this (any more than a fairish knowledge of Schopenhauer)would gain me any particular credit. It was a blessed state to be in,but for the moment depressing. As I left the Hall after that essay Iheard one candidate say to his friend, "I worked in all my stuff aboutRousseau and the Social Contract." That struck dismay into my soul, forthough I had dabbled (not to my good) in the Confessions I knewnothing of the Contrat Social. At the beginning of the morning a niceHarrovian had whispered to me, "I don't even know if it's Sam or Ben."In my innocence I explained to him that it was Sam and could not be Benbecause Ben was spelled without an H. I did not think there could be anyharm in giving away such information.

When I arrived home I told my father that I had almost certainly failed.It was an admission calculated to bring out all his tenderness andchivalry. The man who could not understand a boy's taking his ownpossible, or probable, death into account could very well understand achild's disappointment. Not a word was now heard of expenses anddifficulties; nothing but consolation, reassurance and affection. Then,almost on Christmas Eve, we heard that "Univ." (University College) hadelected me.

Though I was now a scholar of my College I still had to pass"Responsions", which involved elementary mathematics. To prepare forthis I returned after Christmas for one last term with Kirk--a goldenterm, poignantly happy under the approaching shadow. At Easter I washandsomely ploughed in Responsions, having been unable as usual to getmy sums right. "Be more careful," was the advice that everyone gave me,but I found it useless. The more care I took the more mistakes I made;just as, to this day, the more anxiously I fair copy a piece of writingthe more certain I am to make a ghastly clerical error in the very firstline.

In spite of this I came into residence in the summer (Trinity) term of1917; for the real object now was simply to enter the UniversityOfficers' Training Corps as my most promising route into the Army. Myfirst studies at Oxford, nevertheless, still had Responsions in view. Iread algebra (devil take it!) with old Mr. Campbell of Hertford whoturned out to be a friend of our dear friend Janie M. That I neverpassed Responsions is certain, but I cannot remember whether I again satfor it and was again ploughed. The question became unimportant after thewar, for a benevolent decree exempted ex-Service men from taking it.Otherwise, no doubt, I should have had to abandon the idea of going toOxford.

I was less than a term at Univ when my papers came through and Ienlisted; and the conditions made it a most abnormal term. Half theCollege had been converted into a hospital and was in the hands of theR.A.M.C. In the remaining portion lived a tiny community ofundergraduates--two of us not yet of military age, two unfit, one aSinn-Feiner who would not fight for England, and a few other oddmentswhich I never quite placed. We dined in the little lecture room which isnow a passage between Common Room and Hall. Small though our numberswere (about eight) we were rather distinguished, for we included E. V.Gordon, afterwards Professor of English at Manchester, and A. C. Ewing,the Cambridge philosopher; also that witty and kindly man, TheobaldButler, skilled in turning the most lurid limericks into Greek verse. Ienjoyed myself greatly; but it bore little resemblance to normalundergraduate life and was for me an unsettled, excited, and generallyuseless period. Then came the Army. By a remarkable turn of fate thisdid not mean removal from Oxford. I was drafted into a Cadet Battalionwhose billet was Keble.

I passed through the ordinary course of training (a mild affair in thosedays compared with that of the recent war) and was commissioned as aSecond Lieutenant in the Somerset Light Infantry, the old XIIIth Foot. Iarrived in the front line trenches on my nineteenth birthday (November1917), saw most of my service in the villages before Arras--Fampoux andMonchy--and was wounded at Mt. Bernenchon, near Lillers, in April 1918.

I am surprised that I did not dislike the Army more. It was, of course,detestable. But the words "of course" drew the sting. That is where itdiffered from Wyvern. One did not expect to like it. Nobody said youought to like it. Nobody pretended to like it. Everyone you met took itfor granted that the whole thing was an odious necessity, a ghastlyinterruption of rational life. And that made all the difference.Straight tribulation is easier to bear than tribulation which advertisesitself as pleasure. The one breeds camaraderie and even (when intense)a kind of love between the fellow-sufferers; the other, mutual distrust,cynicism, concealed and fretting resentment. And secondly, I found mymilitary elders and betters incomparably nicer than the Wyvern Bloods.This is no doubt because Thirty is naturally kinder to Nineteen thanNineteen is to Thirteen: it is really grown-up and does not need toreassure itself. But I am inclined to think that my face had altered.That "look" which I had so often been told to "take off it" hadapparently taken itself off--perhaps when I read Phantastes. There iseven some evidence that it had been succeeded by a look which excitedeither pity or kindly amusem*nt. Thus, on my very first night in France,in a vast marquee or drill hall where about a hundred officers were tosleep on plank beds, two middle-aged Canadians at once took charge of meand treated me, not like a son (that might have given offence) but likea long-lost friend. Blessings upon them! Once, too, in the Officers'Club at Arras where I was dining alone, and quite happy with my book andmy wine (a bottle of Heidsieck then cost 8 francs, and a bottle ofPerrier Jouet, 12) two immensely senior officers, all covered withribbons and red tabs, came over to my table towards the end of the meal,and hailing me as "Sunny Jim" carried me off to their own for brandy andcigars. They weren't drunk either; nor did they make me drunk. It waspure good will. And though exceptional, this was not so veryexceptional. There were nasty people in the army; but memory fills thosemonths with pleasant, transitory contacts. Every few days one seemed tomeet a scholar, an original, a poet, a cheery buffoon, a raconteur, orat the least a man of good will.

Some time in the middle of that winter I had the good luck to fall sickwith what the troops called "trench fever" and the doctors P.U.O.(Pyrexia, unknown origin) and was sent for a wholly delightful threeweeks to hospital at Le Tréport. Perhaps I ought to have mentionedbefore that I had had a weak chest ever since childhood and had veryearly learned to make a minor illness one of the pleasures of life, evenin peace-time. Now, as an alternative to the trenches, a bed and a bookwere "very heaven". The hospital was a converted hotel and we were twoin a room. My first week was marred by the fact that one of the nightnurses was conducting a furious love affair with my room-mate. I had toohigh a temperature to be embarrassed, but the human whisper is a verytedious and unmusical noise; especially at night. After that my fortunemended. The amorous man was sent elsewhere and replaced by a musicalmisogynist from Yorkshire, who on our second morning together said tome, "Eh, lad, if we make beds ourselves dom b----s won't stay in room solong" (or words to that effect). Accordingly, we made our own beds everyday, and every day when the two V.A.D.'s looked in they said, "Oh,they've made their beds! Aren't these two good?" and rewarded us withtheir brightest smiles. I think they attributed our action to gallantry.

It was here that I first read a volume of Chesterton's essays. I hadnever heard of him and had no idea of what he stood for; nor can I quiteunderstand why he made such an immediate conquest of me. It might havebeen expected that my pessimism, my atheism, and my hatred of sentimentwould have made him to me the least congenial of all authors. It wouldalmost seem that Providence, or some "second cause" of a very obscurekind, quite over-rules our previous tastes when It decides to bring twominds together. Liking an author may be as involuntary and improbable asfalling in love. I was by now a sufficiently experienced reader todistinguish liking from agreement. I did not need to accept whatChesterton said in order to enjoy it. His humour was of the kind which Ilike best--not "jokes" imbedded in the page like currants in a cake,still less (what I cannot endure), a general tone of flippancy andjocularity, but the humour which is not in any way separable from theargument but is rather (as Aristotle would say) the "bloom" on dialecticitself. The sword glitters not because the swordsman set out to make itglitter but because he is fighting for his life and therefore moving itvery quickly. For the critics who think Chesterton frivolous or"paradoxical" I have to work hard to feel even pity; sympathy is out ofthe question. Moreover, strange as it may seem, I liked him for hisgoodness. I can attribute this taste to myself freely (even at that age)because it was a liking for goodness which had nothing to do with anyattempt to be good myself. I have never felt the dislike of goodnesswhich seems to be quite common in better men than me. "Smug" and"smugness" were terms of disapprobation which had never had a place inmy critical vocabulary. I lacked the cynic's nose, the odora canum visor bloodhound sensitivity for hypocrisy or Pharisaism. It was a matterof taste: I felt the "charm" of goodness as a man feels the charm of awoman he has no intention of marrying. It is, indeed, at that distancethat its "charm" is most apparent.

In reading Chesterton, as in reading MacDonald, I did not know what Iwas letting myself in for. A young man who wishes to remain a soundAtheist cannot be too careful of his reading. There are trapseverywhere--"Bibles laid open, millions of surprises," as Herbert says,"fine nets and stratagems." God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous.

In my own battalion also I was assailed. Here I met one Johnson (on whombe peace) who would have been a lifelong friend if he had not beenkilled. He was, like me, already a scholar of an Oxford college(Queen's) who hoped to take up his scholarship after the war, but a fewyears my senior and at that time in command of a company. In him I founddialectical sharpness such as I had hitherto known only in Kirk, butcoupled with youth and whim and poetry. He was moving towards Theism andwe had endless arguments on that and every other topic whenever we wereout of the line. But it was not this that mattered. The important thingwas that he was a man of conscience. I had hardly till now encounteredprinciples in anyone so nearly of my own age and my own sort. Thealarming thing was that he took them for granted. It crossed my mind forthe first time since my apostasy that the severer virtues might havesome relevance to one's own life. I say "the severer virtues" because Ialready had some notion of kindness and faithfulness to friends andgenerosity about money--as who has not till he meets the temptation whichgives all their opposite vices new and more civil names? But it had notseriously occurred to me that people like ourselves, people like Johnsonand me who wanted to know whether beauty was objective or how Aeschylushandled the reconciliation of Zeus and Prometheus, should be attemptingstrict veracity, chastity, or devotion to duty. I had taken it that theywere not our subjects. There was no discussion between us on the pointand I do not think he ever suspected the truth about me. I was at nopains to display it. If this is hypocrisy, then I must conclude thathypocrisy can do a man good. To be ashamed of what you were about tosay, to pretend that something which you had meant seriously was only ajoke--this is an ignoble part. But it is better than not to be ashamed atall. And the distinction between pretending you are better than you areand beginning to be better in reality is finer than moral sleuthhoundsconceive. I was, in intention, concealing only a part: I accepted hisprinciples at once, made no attempt internally to defend my own"unexamined life". When a boor first enters the society of courteouspeople what can he do, for a while, except imitate the motions? How canhe learn except by imitation?

You will have divined that ours was a very nice battalion; a minority ofgood regulars ruling a pleasantly mixed population of promoted rankers(west country farmers, these), barristers, and university men. You couldget as good talk there as anywhere. Perhaps the best of us all was ourbutt, Wallie. Wallie was a farmer, a Roman Catholic, a passionatesoldier (the only man I met who really longed for fighting) and gullibleto any degree by the rawest subaltern. The technique was to criticisethe Yeomanry. Poor Wallie knew that it was the bravest, the mostefficient, the hardest and cleanest corps that ever sat on horses. Heknew all that inside, having learned it from an uncle in the Yeomanrywhen he was a child. But he could not get it out. He stammered andcontradicted himself and always came at last to his trump card: "I wishmy Uncle Ben was here to talk to you. Uncle Bend talk to you. He'd tellyou." Mortals must not judge; but I doubt whether any man fought inFrance who was more likely to go straight to Heaven if he were killed. Iwould have been better employed cleaning his boots than laughing at him.I may add that I did not enjoy the short time I spent in the company hecommanded. Wallie had a genuine passion for killing Germans and acomplete disregard of his own or anyone else's safety. He was alwaysstriking out bright ideas at which the hair of us subalterns stood onend. Luckily he could be very easily dissuaded by any plausible argumentthat occurred to us. Such was his valour and innocence that he never fora moment suspected us of any but a military motive. He could never graspthe neighbourly principles which, by the tacit agreement of the troops,were held to govern trench-warfare, and to which I was introduced atonce by my sergeant. I had suggested "pooping" a rifle grenade into aGerman post where we had seen heads moving. "Just as 'ee like, zir,"said the sergeant, scratching his head, "but once 'ee start doing thatkind of thing, 'ee'll get zummit back, zee?"

I must not paint the war-time army all gold. I met there both the Worldand the great goddess Nonsense. The world presented itself in a veryridiculous form on that night (my nineteenth birthday) when I firstarrived "up the line". As I emerged from the shaft into the dug-out andblinked in the candle-light I noticed that the Captain to whom I wasreporting was a master whom I had liked more than I had respected at oneof my schools. I ventured to claim acquaintance. He admitted in a low,hurried voice that he had once been a schoolmaster, and the topic wasnever raised between us again. The impact of the Great Goddess was evenfunnier, and I met it long before I had reached my own battalion. Thetroop train from Rouen--that interminable, twelve-mile-an-hour train, inwhich no two coaches were alike--left at about ten in the evening. Threeother officers and I were allotted a compartment. There was no heating;for light we brought our own candles; for sanitation there were thewindows. The journey would last about fifteen hours. It was freezinghard. In the tunnel just outside Rouen (all my generation remember it)there was a sudden wrenching and grating noise and one of our doorsdropped off bodily into the dark. We sat with chattering teeth till thenext stop, where the officer commanding the train came bustling up anddemanded what we had done with our door. "It came off, sir," said we."Don't talk nonsense," said he, "it wouldn't have come off if therehadn't been some horseplay!"--as if nothing were more natural than thatfour officers (being, of course, provided with screwdrivers) shouldbegin a night journey in midwinter by removing the door of theircarriage.

The war itself has been so often described by those who saw more of itthan I that I shall here say little about it. Until the great Germanattack came in the Spring we had a pretty quiet time. Even then theyattacked not us but the Canadians on our right, merely "keeping usquiet" by pouring shells into our line about three a minute all day. Ithink it was that day I noticed how a greater terror overcomes a less: amouse that I met (and a poor shivering mouse it was, as I was a poorshivering man) made no attempt to run from me. Through the winter,weariness and water were our chief enemies. I have gone to sleepmarching and woken again and found myself marching still. One walked inthe trenches in thigh gum boots with water above the knee; one remembersthe icy stream welling up inside the boot when you punctured it onconcealed barbed wire. Familiarity both with the very old and the veryrecent dead confirmed that view of corpses which had been formed themoment I saw my dead mother. I came to know and pity and reverence theordinary man: particularly dear Sergeant Ayres, who was (I suppose)killed by the same shell that wounded me. I was a futile officer (theygave commissions too easily then), a puppet moved about by him, and heturned this ridiculous and painful relation into something beautiful,became to me almost like a father. But for the rest, the war--thefrights, the cold, the smell of H.E., the horribly smashed men stillmoving like half-crushed beetles, the sitting or standing corpses, thelandscape of sheer earth without a blade of grass, the boots worn dayand night till they seemed to grow to your feet--all this shows rarelyand faintly in memory. It is too cut off from the rest of my experienceand often seems to have happened to someone else. It is even in a wayunimportant. One imaginative moment seems now to matter more than therealities that followed. It was the first bullet I heard--so far from methat it "whined" like a journalist's or a peace-time poet's bullet. Atthat moment there was something not exactly like fear, much less likeindifference: a little quavering signal that said, "This is War. This iswhat Homer wrote about."

XIII. The New Look

This wall I was many a weary month in finishing, and yet neverthought myself safe till it was done.
DEFOE, Robinson Crusoe

The rest of my war experiences have little to do with this story. How I"took" about sixty prisoners--that is, discovered to my great relief thatthe crowd of field-grey figures who suddenly appeared from nowhere, allhad their hands up-is not worth telling, save as a joke. Did notFalstaff "take" Sir Colville of the Dale? Nor does it concern the readerto know how I got a sound "Blighty" from an English shell, or how theexquisite Sister N. in the C.C.S. has ever since embodied my idea ofArtemis. Two things stand out. One is the moment, just after I had beenhit, when I found (or thought I found) that I was not breathing andconcluded that this was death. I felt no fear and certainly no courage.It did not seem to be an occasion for either. The proposition "Here is aman dying" stood before my mind as dry, as factual, as unemotional assomething in a text-book. It was not even interesting. The fruit of thisexperience was that when, some years later, I met Kant's distinctionbetween the Noumenal and the Phenomenal self, it was more to me than anabstraction. I had tasted it; I had proved that there was a fullyconscious "I" whose connections with the "me" of introspection wereloose and transitory. The other momentous experience was that of readingBergson in a Convalescent Camp on Salisbury Plain. Intellectually thistaught me to avoid the snares that lurk about the word Nothing. But italso had a revolutionary effect on my emotional outlook. Hitherto mywhole bent had been towards things pale, remote, and evanescent; thewater-colour world of Morris, the leafy recesses of Malory,[6]the twilight of Yeats. The word "life" had for me pretty much the sameassociations it had for Shelley in The Triumph of Life. I would nothave understood what Goethe meant by des Lebens goldnes Baum. Bergsonshowed me. He did not abolish my old loves, but he gave me a new one.From him I first learned to relish energy, fertility, and urgency; theresource, the triumphs, and even the insolence, of things that grow. Ibecame capable of appreciating artists who would, I believe, have meantnothing to me before; all the resonant, dogmatic, flaming, unanswerablepeople like Beethoven, Titian (in his mythological pictures), Goethe,Dunbar, Pindar, Christopher Wren, and the more exultant Psalms.

[Footnote 6]The iron in Malory, the tragedy of contrition, I did not yet at allperceive.

I returned to Oxford--"demobbed"--in January 1919. But before I sayanything of my life there I must warn the reader that one huge andcomplex episode will be omitted. I have no choice about this reticence.All I can or need say is that my earlier hostility to the emotions wasvery fully and variously avenged. But even were I free to tell thestory, I doubt if it has much to do with the subject of the book.

The first lifelong friend I made at Oxford was A. K. Hamilton Jenkin,since known for his books on Cornwall. He continued (what Arthur hadbegun) my education as a seeing, listening, smelling, receptivecreature. Arthur had had his preference for the Homely. But Jenkinseemed to be able to enjoy everything; even ugliness. I learned from himthat we should attempt a total surrender to whatever atmosphere wasoffering itself at the moment; in a squalid town to seek out those veryplaces where its squalor rose to grimness and almost grandeur, on adismal day to find the most dismal and dripping wood, on a windy day toseek the windiest ridge. There was no Betjemannic irony about it; only aserious, yet gleeful, determination to rub one's nose in the veryquiddity of each thing, to rejoice in its being (so magnificently) whatit was.

My next was Owen Barfield. There is a sense in which Arthur and Barfieldare the types of every man's First Friend and Second Friend. The Firstis the alter ego, the man who first reveals to you that you are notalone in the world by turning out (beyond hope) to share all your mostsecret delights. There is nothing to be overcome in making him yourfriend; he and you join like rain-drops on a window. But the SecondFriend is the man who disagrees with you about everything. He is not somuch the alter ego as the anti-self. Of course he shares yourinterests; otherwise he would not become your friend at all. But he hasapproached them all at a different angle. He has read all the rightbooks but has got the wrong thing out of every one. It is as if he spokeyour language but mispronounced it. How can he be so nearly right andyet, invariably, just not right? He is as fascinating (and infuriating)as a woman. When you set out to correct his heresies, you find that heforsooth has decided to correct yours! And then you go at it, hammer andtongs, far into the night, night after night, or walking through finecountry that neither gives a glance to, each learning the weight of theother's punches, and often more like mutually respectful enemies thanfriends. Actually (though it never seems so at the time) you modify oneanother's thought; out of this perpetual dog-fight a community of mindand a deep affection emerge. But I think he changed me a good deal morethan I him. Much of the thought which he afterwards put into PoeticDiction had already become mine before that important little bookappeared. It would be strange if it had not. He was of course not solearned then as he has since become; but the genius was already there.

Closely linked with Barfield of Wadham was his friend (and soon mine),A. C. Harwood of The House, later a pillar of Michael Hall, theSteinerite school at Kidbrooke. He was different from either of us; awholly imperturbable man. Though poor (like most of us) and whollywithout "prospects", he wore the expression of a nineteenth-centurygentleman with something in the Funds. On a walking tour when the lastlight of a wet evening had just revealed some ghastly error inmap-reading (probably his own) and the best hope was "Five miles toMudham (if we could find it) and we might get beds there," he stillwore that expression. In the heat of argument he wore it still. Youwould think that he, if anyone, would have been told to "take that lookoff his face". But I don't believe he ever was. It was no mask and camefrom no stupidity. He has been tried since by all the usual sorrows andanxieties. He is the sole Horatio known to me in this age of Hamlets; no"stop for Fortune's finger".

There is one thing to be said about these and other friends whom I madeat Oxford. They were all, by decent Pagan standards (much more, by solow a standard as mine), "good". That is, they all, like my friendJohnson, believed, and acted on the belief, that veracity, publicspirit, chastity, and sobriety were obligatory--"to be attempted," as theexaminers say, "by all candidates." Johnson had prepared me to beinfluenced by them. I accepted their standards in principle and perhaps(this part I do not very well remember) tried to act accordingly.

During my first two years at Oxford I was busily engaged (apart from"doing Mods." and "beginning Greats") in assuming what we may call anintellectual "New Look". There was to be no more pessimism, no moreself-pity, no flirtations with any idea of the supernatural, no romanticdelusions. In a word, like the heroine of Northanger Abbey, I formedthe resolution "of always judging and acting in future with the greatestgood sense". And good sense meant, for me at that moment, a retreat,almost a panic-stricken flight, from all that sort of romanticism whichhad hitherto been the chief concern of my life. Several causes operatedtogether.

For one thing, I had recently come to know an old, dirty, gabbling,tragic, Irish parson who had long since lost his faith but retained hisliving. By the time I met him his only interest was the search forevidence of "human survival". On this he read and talked incessantly,and, having a highly critical mind, could never satisfy himself. Whatwas especially shocking was that the ravenous desire for personalimmortality co-existed in him with (apparently) a total indifference toall that could, on a sane view, make immortality desirable. He was notseeking the Beatific Vision and did not even believe in God. He was nothoping for more time in which to purge and improve his own personality.He was not dreaming of reunion with dead friends or lovers; I neverheard him speak with affection of anybody. All he wanted was theassurance that something he could call "himself" would, on almost anyterms, last longer than his bodily life. So, at least, I thought. I wastoo young and hard to suspect that what secretly moved him was a thirstfor the happiness which had been wholly denied him on earth. And hisstate of mind appeared to me the most contemptible I had everencountered. Any thoughts or dreams which might lead one into thatfierce monomania were, I decided, to be utterly shunned. The wholequestion of immortality became rather disgusting to me. I shut it out.All one's thoughts must be confined to

the very world, which is the world
Of all of us--the place where, in the end,
We find our happiness, or not at all.

Secondly, it had been my chance to spend fourteen days, and most of thefourteen nights as well, in close contact with a man who was going mad.He was a man whom I had dearly loved, and well he deserved love. And nowI helped to hold him while he kicked and wallowed on the floor,screaming out that devils were tearing him and that he was that momentfalling down into Hell. And this man, as I well knew, had not kept thebeaten track. He had flirted with Theosophy, Yoga, Spiritualism,Psychoanalysis, what not? Probably these things had in fact noconnection with his insanity, for which (I believe) there were physicalcauses. But it did not seem so to me at the time. I thought I had seen awarning; it was to this, this raving on the floor, that all romanticlongings and unearthly speculations led a man in the end--

Be not too wildly amorous of the far
Nor lure thy fantasy to its utmost scope.

Safety first, thought I: the beaten track, the approved road, the centreof the road, the lights on. For some months after that nightmarefortnight, the words "ordinary" and "humdrum" summed up everything thatappeared to me most desirable.

Thirdly, the new Psychology was at that time sweeping through us all. Wedid not swallow it whole (few people then did) but we were allinfluenced. What we were most concerned about was "Fantasy" or "wishfulthinking". For (of course) we were all poets and critics and set a verygreat value on "Imagination" in some high Coleridgean sense, so that itbecame important to distinguish Imagination, not only (as Coleridge did)from Fancy, but also from Fantasy as the psychologists understand thatterm. Now what, I asked myself, were all my delectable mountains andwestern gardens but sheer Fantasies? Had they not revealed their truenature by luring me, time and again, into undisguisedly erotic reverieor the squalid nightmare of Magic? In reality, of course, as previouschapters have told, my own experience had repeatedly shown that theseromantic images had never been more than a sort of flash, or even slag,thrown off by the occurrence of Joy, that those mountains and gardenshad never been what I wanted but only symbols which professed themselvesto be no more, and that every effort to treat them as the real Desirablesoon honestly proved itself to be a failure. But now, busy with my NewLook, I managed to forget this. Instead of repenting my idolatry Ivilified the unoffending images on which I had lavished it. With theconfidence of a boy I decided I had done with all that. No more Avalon,no more Hesperides. I had (this was very precisely the opposite of thetruth) "seen through" them. And I was never going to be taken in again.

Finally, there was of course Bergson. Somehow or other (for it does notseem very clear when I re-open his books today) I found in him arefutation of the old haunting idea, Schopenhauer's idea, that theuniverse "might not have existed". In other words one Divine attribute,that of necessary existence, rose above my horizon. It was still, andlong after, attached to the wrong subject; to the universe, not to God.But the mere attribute was itself of immense potency. When once one hasdropped the absurd notion that reality is an arbitrary alternative to"nothing", one gives up being a pessimist (or even an optimist). Thereis no sense in blaming or praising the Whole, nor, indeed, in sayinganything about it. Even if you persist in hurling Promethean orHardyesque defiances at it, then, since you are part of it, it is onlythat same Whole which through you "quietly declaims the cursings ofitself"--a futility which seems to me to vitiate Lord Russell's stirringessay on "The Worship of a Free Man". Cursings were as futile, and asimmature, as dreams about the western garden. One must (like Carlyle'slady) "accept" the universe; totally, with no reservations, loyally.This sort of Stoical Monism was the philosophy of my New Look. And itgave me a great sense of peace. It was perhaps the nearest thing to areligious experience which I had had since my prep. school days. Itended (I hope forever) any idea of a treaty or compromise with reality.So much the perception of even one Divine attribute can do.

As for Joy, I labelled it "aesthetic experience" and talked much aboutit under that name and said it was very "valuable". But it came veryseldom and when it came it didn't amount to much.

Those early days of the New Look were on the whole happy ones. Verygradually the sky changed. There came to be more unhappiness and anxietyin my own life; and Barfield was living through

that whole year of youth
When life ached like an aching tooth.

Our generation, the generation of the returned soldiers, began to pass.Oxford was full of new faces. Freshmen began to make historicalallowances for our warped point of view. The problem of one's careerloomed larger and grimmer.

It was then that a really dreadful thing (dreadful to me) happened.First Harwood (still without changing his expression), and thenBarfield, embraced the doctrines of Steiner and became Anthroposophists.I was hideously shocked. Everything that I had laboured so hard to expelfrom my own life seemed to have flared up and met me in my best friends.Not only my best friends but those whom I would have thought safest; theone so immovable, the other brought up in a free-thinking family and soimmune from all "superstition" that he had hardly heard of Christianityitself until he went to school. (The gospel first broke on Barfield inthe form of a dictated list of Parables Peculiar to St. Matthew.) Notonly in my seeming-safest friends but at a moment when we all had mostneed to stand together. And as I came to learn (so far as I ever havelearned) what Steiner thought, my horror turned into disgust andresentment. For here, apparently, were all the abominations; none moreabominable than those which had once attracted me. Here were gods,spirits, after-life and pre-existence, initiates, occult knowledge,meditation. "Why--damn it--it's medieval," I exclaimed; for I still hadall the chronological snobbery of my period and used the names ofearlier periods as terms of abuse. Here was everything which the NewLook had been designed to exclude; everything that might lead one offthe main road into those dark places where men wallow on the floor andscream that they are being dragged down into Hell. Of course it was allarrant nonsense. There was no danger of my being taken in. But then,the loneliness, the sense of being deserted.

Naturally, I attributed to my friends the same desires which, had Ibecome an Anthroposophist, would have been operative in me. I thoughtthey were falling under that ravenous, salt lust for the occult. I nowsee that, from the very first, all the evidence was against this. Theywere not that sort. Nor does Anthroposophy, so far as I can see, caterfor that sort. There is a difficulty and (to me) a re-assuring Germanicdullness about it which would soon deter those who were looking forthrills. Nor have I ever seen that it had a deleterious effect on thecharacter of those who embraced it; I have once known it to have a verygood one.

I say this, not because I ever came within a hundred miles of acceptingthe thing myself, but in common fairness, and also as a tardy amends forthe many hard, unjust and bitter things I once said about it to myfriends. For Barfield's conversion to Anthroposophy marked the beginningof what I can only describe as the Great War between him and me. It wasnever, thank God, a quarrel, though it could have become one in a momentif he had used to me anything like the violence I allowed myself to him.But it was an almost incessant disputation, sometimes by letter andsometimes face to face, which lasted for years. And this Great War wasone of the turning points of my life.

Barfield never made me an Anthroposophist, but his counter-attacksdestroyed forever two elements in my own thought. In the first place hemade short work of what I have called my "chronological snobbery", theuncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own ageand the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that accountdiscredited. You must find why it went out of date. Was it ever refuted(and if so by whom, where, and how conclusively) or did it merely dieaway as fashions do? If the latter, this tells us nothing about itstruth or falsehood. From seeing this, one passes to the realisation thatour own age is also "a period", and certainly has, like all periods, itsown characteristic illusions. They are likeliest to lurk in thosewide-spread assumptions which are so ingrained in the age that no onedares to attack or feels it necessary to defend them. In the secondplace he convinced me that the positions we had hitherto held left noroom for any satisfactory theory of knowledge. We had been, in thetechnical sense of the term, "realists"; that is, we accepted asrock-bottom reality the universe revealed by the senses. But at the sametime we continued to make for certain phenomena of consciousness all theclaims that really went with a theistic or idealistic view. Wemaintained that abstract thought (if obedient to logical rules) gaveindisputable truth, that our moral judgment was "valid", and ouraesthetic experience not merely pleasing but "valuable". The view was, Ithink, common at the time; it runs through Bridges' Testament ofBeauty, the work of Gilbert Murray, and Lord Russell's "Worship of aFree Man". Barfield convinced me that it was inconsistent. If thoughtwere a purely subjective event, these claims for it would have to beabandoned. If one kept (as rock-bottom reality) the universe of thesenses, aided by instruments and co-ordinated so as to form "science",then one would have to go much further--as many have since gone--and adopta Behaviouristic theory of logic, ethics, and aesthetics. But such atheory was, and is, unbelievable to me. I am using the word"unbelievable", which many use to mean "improbable" or even"undesirable", in a quite literal sense. I mean that the act ofbelieving what the behaviourist believes is one that my mind simply willnot perform. I cannot force my thought into that shape any more than Ican scratch my ear with my big toe or pour wine out of a bottle into thecavity at the base of that same bottle. It is as final as a physicalimpossibility. I was therefore compelled to give up realism. I had beentrying to defend it ever since I began reading philosophy. Partly, nodoubt, this was mere "cussedness". Idealism was then the dominantphilosophy at Oxford and I was by nature "against Government". Butpartly, too, realism satisfied an emotional need. I wanted Nature to bequite independent of our observation; something other, indifferent,self-existing. (This went with the Jenkinian zest for rubbing one's nosein the mere quiddity.) But now, it seemed to me, I had to give that up.Unless I were to accept an unbelievable alternative, I must admit thatmind was no late-come epiphenomenon; that the whole universe was, in thelast resort, mental; that our logic was participation in a cosmicLogos.

It is astonishing (at this time of day) that I could regard thisposition as something quite distinct from Theism. I suspect there wassome wilful blindness. But there were in those days all sorts ofblankets, insulators, and insurances which enabled one to get all theconveniences of Theism, without believing in God. The English Hegelians,writers like T. H. Green, Bradley, and Bosanquet (then mighty names),dealt in precisely such wares. The Absolute Mind--better still, theAbsolute--was impersonal, or it knew itself (but not us?) only in us, andit was so absolute that it wasn't really much more like a mind thananything else. And anyway, the more muddled one got about it and themore contradictions one committed, the more this proved that ourdiscursive thought moved only on the level of "Appearance", and"Reality" must be somewhere else. And where else but, of course, in theAbsolute? There, not here, was "the fuller splendour" behind the"sensuous curtain". The emotion that went with all this was certainlyreligious. But this was a religion that cost nothing. We could talkreligiously about the Absolute: but there was no danger of Its doinganything about us. It was "there"; safely and immovably "there". Itwould never come "here", never (to be blunt) make a nuisance of Itself.This quasi-religion was all a one-way street; all eros (as Dr. Nygrenwould say) steaming up, but no agape darting down. There was nothingto fear; better still, nothing to obey.

Yet there was one really wholesome element in it. The Absolute was"there", and that "there" contained the reconciliation of allcontraries, the transcendence of all finitude, the hidden glory whichwas the only perfectly real thing there is. In fact, it had much of thequality of Heaven. But it was a Heaven none of us could ever get to. Forwe are appearances. To be "there" is, by definition, not to be we. Allwho embrace such a philosophy live, like Dante's virtuous Pagans, "indesire without hope". Or like Spinoza they so love their God as to beunable even to wish that He should love them in return. I should be verysorry not to have passed through that experience. I think it is morereligious than many experiences that have been called Christian. What Ilearned from the Idealists (and still most strongly hold) is this maxim:it is more important that Heaven should exist than that any of us shouldreach it.

And so the great Angler played His fish and I never dreamed that thehook was in my tongue. But two great advances had been made. Bergson hadshowed me necessary existence; and from Idealism I had come one stepnearer to understanding the words, "We give thanks to thee for thy greatglory." The Norse gods had given me the first hint of it; but then Ididn't believe in them, and I did believe (so far as one can believe anUnding) in the Absolute.

XIV. Checkmate

The one principle of hell is--"I am my own."
GEORGE MACDONALD

In the summer of 1922 I finished Greats. As there were no philosophicalposts going, or none that I could get, my long-suffering father offeredme a fourth year at Oxford during which I read English so as to get asecond string to my bow. The Great War with Barfield had, I think, begunat this time.

No sooner had I entered the English School than I went to GeorgeGordon's discussion class. And there I made a new friend. The very firstwords he spoke marked him out from the ten or twelve others who werepresent; a man after my own heart, and that too at an age when theinstantaneous friendships of earlier youth were becoming rather rareevents. His name was Nevill Coghill. I soon had the shock of discoveringthat he--clearly the most intelligent and best-informed man in thatclass--was a Christian and a thoroughgoing supernaturalist. There wereother traits that I liked but found (for I was still very much a modern)oddly archaic; chivalry, honour, courtesy, "freedom", and "gentillesse".One could imagine him fighting a duel. He spoke much "ribaldry" butnever "villeinye". Barfield was beginning to overthrow my chronologicalsnobbery; Coghill gave it another blow. Had something really dropped outof our lives? Was the archaic simply the civilised, and the modernsimply the barbaric? It will seem strange to many of my critics whor*gard me as a typical laudator temporis acti that this questionshould have arisen so comparatively late in my life. But then the key tomy books is Donne's maxim, "The heresies that men leave are hated most."The things I assert most vigorously are those that I resisted long andaccepted late.

These disturbing factors in Coghill ranged themselves with a widerdisturbance which was now threatening my whole earlier outlook. All thebooks were beginning to turn against me. Indeed, I must have been asblind as a bat not to have seen, long before, the ludicrouscontradiction between my theory of life and my actual experiences as areader. George MacDonald had done more to me than any other writer; ofcourse it was a pity he had that bee in his bonnet about Christianity.He was good in spite of it. Chesterton had more sense than all theother moderns put together; bating, of course, his Christianity. Johnsonwas one of the few authors whom I felt I could trust utterly; curiouslyenough, he had the same kink. Spenser and Milton by a strangecoincidence had it too. Even among ancient authors the same paradox wasto be found. The most religious (Plato, Aeschylus, Virgil) were clearlythose on whom I could really feed. On the other hand, those writers whodid not suffer from religion and with whom in theory my sympathy oughtto have been complete--Shaw and Wells and Mill and Gibbon andVoltaire--all seemed a little thin; what as boys we called "tinny". Itwasn't that I didn't like them. They were all (especially Gibbon)entertaining; but hardly more. There seemed to be no depth in them. Theywere too simple. The roughness and density of life did not appear intheir books.

Now that I was reading more English, the paradox began to be aggravated.I was deeply moved by the Dream of the Rood; more deeply still byLangland; intoxicated (for a time) by Donne; deeply and lastinglysatisfied by Thomas Browne. But the most alarming of all was GeorgeHerbert. Here was a man who seemed to me to excel all the authors I hadever read in conveying the very quality of life as we actually live itfrom moment to moment; but the wretched fellow, instead of doing it alldirectly, insisted on meditating it though what I would still havecalled "the Christian mythology". On the other hand most of the authorswho might be claimed as precursors of modern enlightenment seemed to mevery small beer and bored me cruelly. I thought Bacon (to speak frankly)a solemn, pretentious ass, yawned my way through Restoration Comedy,and, having manfully struggled on to the last line of Don Juan, wroteon the end-leaf "Never again". The only non-Christians who seemed to mereally to know anything were the Romantics; and a good many of them weredangerously tinged with something like religion, even at times withChristianity. The upshot of it all could nearly be expressed in aperversion of Roland's great line in the Chanson--

Christians are wrong, but all the rest are bores.

The natural step would have been to inquire a little more closelywhether the Christians were, after all, wrong. But I did not take it. Ithought I could explain their superiority without that hypothesis.Absurdly (yet many Absolute Idealists have shared this absurdity) Ithought that "the Christian myth" conveyed to unphilosophic minds asmuch of the truth, that is of Absolute Idealism, as they were capable ofgrasping, and that even that much put them above the irreligious. Thosewho could not rise to the notion of the Absolute would come nearer tothe truth by belief in "a God" than by disbelief. Those who could notunderstand how, as Reasoners, we participated in a timeless andtherefore deathless world, would get a symbolic shadow of the truth bybelieving in a life after death. The implication--that something which Iand most other undergraduates could master without extraordinary painswould have been too hard for Plato, Dante, Hooker, and Pascal--did notyet strike me as absurd. I hope this is because I never looked itsquarely in the face.

As the plot quickens and thickens towards its end, I leave out more andmore of such matters as would go into a full autobiography. My father'sdeath, with all the fortitude (even playfulness) which he displayed inhis last illness, does not really come into the story I am telling. Mybrother was at that time in Shanghai. Nor would it be relevant to tellin detail how I became a temporary lecturer at Univ. for a year and waselected a fellow of Magdalen in 1925. The worst is that I must leaveundescribed many men whom I love and to whom I am deeply in debt; G. H.Stevenson and E. F. Carritt, my tutors, the Fark (but who could painthim anyway?), and five great Magdalen men who enlarged my very idea ofwhat a learned life should be--P. V. M. Benecke, C. C. J. Webb, J. A.Smith, F. E. Brightman, and C. T. Onions. Except for Oldie, I havealways been blessed both in my official and my unofficial teachers. Inmy earlier years at Magdalen I inhabited a world where hardly anything Iwanted to know needed to be found out by my own unaided efforts. One orother of these could always give you a clue. ("You'll find somethingabout it in Alanus...."--"Macrobius would be the man totry...."--"Doesn't Comparetti mention it?"... "Have you looked forit in Du Cange?") I found, as always, that the ripest are kindest to theraw and the most studious have most time to spare. When I began teachingfor the English Faculty, I made two other friends, both Christians(these queer people seemed now to pop up on every side) who were laterto give me much help in getting over the last stile. They were H. V. V.Dyson (then of Reading) and J. R. R. Tolkien. Friendship with the lattermarked the breakdown of two old prejudices. At my first coming into theworld I had been (implicitly) warned never to trust a Papist, and at myfirst coming into the English Faculty (explicitly) never to trust aphilologist. Tolkien was both.

Realism had been abandoned; the New Look was somewhat damaged; andchronological snobbery was seriously shaken. All over the board mypieces were in the most disadvantageous positions. Soon I could nolonger cherish even the illusion that the initiative lay with me. MyAdversary began to make His final moves.

The first Move annihilated the last remains of the New Look. I wassuddenly impelled to re-read (which was certainly no business of mine atthe moment) the Hippolytus of Euripides. In one chorus all thatworld's end imagery which I had rejected when I assumed my New Look rosebefore me. I liked, but did not yield; I tried to patronise it. But nextday I was overwhelmed. There was a transitional moment of deliciousuneasiness, and then--instantaneously--the long inhibition was over, thedry desert lay behind, I was off once more into the land of longing, myheart at once broken and exalted as it had never been since the old daysat Bookham. There was nothing whatever to do about it; no question ofreturning to the desert. I had simply been ordered--or, rather,compelled--to "take that look off my face". And never to resume iteither.

The next Move was intellectual, and consolidated the first Move. I readin Alexander's Space Time and Deity his theory of "Enjoyment" and"Contemplation". These are technical terms in Alexander's philosophy;"Enjoyment" has nothing to do with pleasure, nor "Contemplation" withthe contemplative life. When you see a table you "enjoy" the act ofseeing and "contemplate" the table. Later, if you took up Optics andthought about Seeing itself, you would be contemplating the seeing andenjoying the thought. In bereavement you contemplate the beloved and thebeloved's death and, in Alexander's sense, "enjoy" the loneliness andgrief; but a psychologist, if he were considering you as a case ofmelancholia, would be contemplating your grief and enjoying psychology.We do not "think a thought" in the same sense in which we "think thatHerodotus is unreliable". When we think a thought, "thought" is acognate accusative (like "blow" in "strike a blow"). We enjoy thethought (that Herodotus is unreliable) and, in so doing, contemplate theunreliability of Herodotus.

I accepted this distinction at once and have ever since regarded it asan indispensable tool of thought. A moment later its consequences--for mequite catastrophic--began to appear. It seemed to me self-evident thatone essential property of love, hate, fear, hope, or desire wasattention to their object. To cease thinking about or attending to thewoman is, so far, to cease loving; to cease thinking about or attendingto the dreaded thing is, so far, to cease being afraid. But to attend toyour own love or fear is to cease attending to the loved or dreadedobject. In other words the enjoyment and the contemplation of our inneractivities are incompatible. You cannot hope and also think about hopingat the same moment; for in hope we look to hope's object and weinterrupt this by (so to speak) turning round to look at the hopeitself. Of course the two activities can and do alternate with greatrapidity; but they are distinct and incompatible. This was not merely alogical result of Alexander's analysis, but could be verified in dailyand hourly experience. The surest means of disarming an anger or a lustwas to turn your attention from the girl or the insult and startexamining the passion itself. The surest way of spoiling a pleasure wasto start examining your satisfaction. But if so, it followed that allintrospection is in one respect misleading. In introspection we try tolook "inside ourselves" and see what is going on. But nearly everythingthat was going on a moment before is stopped by the very act of ourturning to look at it. Unfortunately this does not mean thatintrospection finds nothing. On the contrary, it finds precisely what isleft behind by the suspension of all our normal activities; and what isleft behind is mainly mental images and physical sensations. The greaterror is to mistake this mere sediment or track or by-product for theactivities themselves. That is how men may come to believe that thoughtis only unspoken words, or the appreciation of poetry only a collectionof mental pictures, when these in reality are what the thought or theappreciation, when interrupted, leave behind--like the swell at sea,working after the wind has dropped. Not, of course, that theseactivities, before we stopped them by introspection, were unconscious.We do not love, fear, or think without knowing it. Instead of thetwofold division into Conscious and Unconscious, we need a three-folddivision: the Unconscious, the Enjoyed, and the Contemplated.

This discovery flashed a new light back on my whole life. I saw that allmy waitings and watchings for Joy, all my vain hopes to find some mentalcontent on which I could, so to speak, lay my finger and say, "This isit," had been a futile attempt to contemplate the enjoyed. All that suchwatching and waiting ever could find would be either an image (Asgard,the Western Garden, or what not) or a quiver in the diaphragm. I shouldnever have to bother again about these images or sensations. I knew nowthat they were merely the mental track left by the passage of Joy--notthe wave but the wave's imprint on the sand. The inherent dialectic ofdesire itself had in a way already shown me this; for all images andsensations, if idolatrously mistaken for Joy itself, soon honestlyconfessed themselves inadequate. All said, in the last resort, "It isnot I. I am only a reminder. Look! Look! What do I remind you of?"

So far, so good. But it is at the next step that awe overtakes me. Therewas no doubt that Joy was a desire (and, in so far as it was alsosimultaneously a good, it was also a kind of love). But a desire isturned not to itself but to its object. Not only that, but it owes allits character to its object. Erotic love is not like desire for food,nay, a love for one woman differs from a love for another woman in thevery same way and the very same degree as the two women differ from oneanother. Even our desire for one wine differs in tone from our desirefor another. Our intellectual desire (curiosity) to know the true answerto a question is quite different from our desire to find that oneanswer, rather than another, is true. The form of the desired is in thedesire. It is the object which makes the desire harsh or sweet, coarseor choice, "high" or "low". It is the object that makes the desireitself desirable or hateful. I perceived (and this was a wonder ofwonders) that just as I had been wrong in supposing that I reallydesired the Garden of the Hesperides, so also I had been equally wrongin supposing that I desired Joy itself. Joy itself, considered simply asan event in my own mind, turned out to be of no value at all. All thevalue lay in that of which Joy was the desiring. And that object, quiteclearly, was no state of my own mind or body at all. In a way, I hadproved this by elimination. I had tried everything in my own mind andbody; as it were, asking myself, "Is it this you want? Is it this?" Lastof all I had asked if Joy itself was what I wanted; and, labelling it"aesthetic experience", had pretended I could answer Yes. But thatanswer too had broken down. Inexorably Joy proclaimed, "You want--Imyself am your want of--something other, outside, not you nor any stateof you." I did not yet ask, Who is the desired? only What is it? Butthis brought me already into the region of awe, for I thus understoodthat in deepest solitude there is a road right out of the self, acommerce with something which, by refusing to identify itself with anyobject of the senses, or anything whereof we have biological or socialneed, or anything imagined, or any state of our own minds, proclaimsitself sheerly objective. Far more objective than bodies, for it is not,like them, clothed in our senses; the naked Other, imageless (though ourimagination salutes it with a hundred images), unknown, undefined,desired.

That was the second Move; equivalent, perhaps, to the loss of one's lastremaining bishop. The third Move did not seem to me dangerous at thetime. It consisted merely in linking up this new éclaircissem*nt aboutJoy with my idealistic philosophy. I saw that Joy, as I now understoodit, would fit in. We mortals, seen as the sciences see us and as wecommonly see one another, are mere "appearances". But appearances of theAbsolute. In so far as we really are at all (which isn't saying much) wehave, so to speak, a root in the Absolute, which is the utter reality.And that is why we experience Joy: we yearn, rightly, for that unitywhich we can never reach except by ceasing to be the separate phenomenalbeings called "we". Joy was not a deception. Its visitations were ratherthe moments of clearest consciousness we had, when we became aware ofour fragmentary and phantasmal nature and ached for that impossiblereunion which would annihilate us or that self-contradictory wakingwhich would reveal, not that we had had, but that we were, a dream.This seemed quite satisfactory intellectually. Even emotionally too; forit matters more that Heaven should exist than that we should ever getthere. What I did not notice was that I had passed an importantmilestone. Up till now my thoughts had been centrifugal; now thecentripetal movement had begun. Considerations arising from quitedifferent parts of my experience were beginning to come together with aclick. This new dovetailing of my desire-life with my philosophyforeshadowed the day, now fast approaching, when I should be forced totake my "philosophy" more seriously than I ever intended. I did notforesee this. I was like a man who has lost "merely a pawn" and neverdreams that this (in that state of the game) means mate in a few moves.

The fourth Move was more alarming. I was now teaching philosophy (Isuspect very badly) as well as English. And my watered Hegelianismwouldn't serve for tutorial purposes.[7]A tutor must make things clear.Now the Absolute cannot be made clear. Do you mean Nobody-knows-what, ordo you mean a superhuman mind and therefore (we may as well admit) aPerson? After all, did Hegel and Bradley and all the rest of them everdo more than add mystifications to the simple, workable, theisticidealism of Berkeley? I thought not. And didn't Berkeley's "God" do allthe same work as the Absolute, with the added advantage that we had atleast some notion of what we meant by Him? I thought He did. So I wasdriven back into something like Berkeleyanism; but Berkeleyanism with afew top-dressings of my own. I distinguished this philosophical "God"very sharply (or so I said) from "the God of popular religion". Therewas, I explained, no possibility of being in a personal relation withHim. For I thought He projected us as a dramatist projects hischaracters, and I could no more "meet" Him, than Hamlet could meetShakespeare. I didn't call Him "God" either; I called Him "Spirit". Onefights for one's remaining comforts.

[Footnote 7]Not, of course, that I thought it a tutor's business to make convertsto his own philosophy. But I found I needed a position of my own asa basis from which to criticise my pupils' essays.

Then I read Chesterton's Everlasting Man and for the first time sawthe whole Christian outline of history set out in a form that seemed tome to make sense. Somehow I contrived not to be too badly shaken. Youwill remember that I already thought Chesterton the most sensible manalive "apart from his Christianity". Now, I veritably believe, Ithought--I didn't of course say; words would have revealed thenonsense--that Christianity itself was very sensible "apart from itsChristianity". But I hardly remember, for I had not long finished TheEverlasting Man when something far more alarming happened to me. Earlyin 1926 the hardest boiled of all the atheists I ever knew sat in myroom on the other side of the fire and remarked that the evidence forthe historicity of the Gospels was really surprisingly good. "Rumthing," he went on. "All that stuff of Frazer's about the Dying God. Rumthing. It almost looks as if it had really happened once." To understandthe shattering impact of it, you would need to know the man (who hascertainly never since shown any interest in Christianity). If he, thecynic of cynics, the toughest of the toughs, were not--as I would stillhave put it--"safe", where could I turn? Was there then no escape?

The odd thing was that before God closed in on me, I was in fact offeredwhat now appears a moment of wholly free choice. In a sense. I was goingup Headington Hill on the top of a bus. Without words and (I think)almost without images, a fact about myself was somehow presented to me.I became aware that I was holding something at bay, or shuttingsomething out. Or, if you like, that I was wearing some stiff clothing,like corsets, or even a suit of armour, as if I were a lobster. I feltmyself being, there and then, given a free choice. I could open the dooror keep it shut; I could unbuckle the armour or keep it on. Neitherchoice was presented as a duty; no threat or promise was attached toeither, though I knew that to open the door or to take off the corsletmeant the incalculable. The choice appeared to be momentous but it wasalso strangely unemotional. I was moved by no desires or fears. In asense I was not moved by anything. I chose to open, to unbuckle, toloosen the rein. I say, "I chose," yet it did not really seem possibleto do the opposite. On the other hand, I was aware of no motives. Youcould argue that I was not a free agent, but I am more inclined to thinkthat this came nearer to being a perfectly free act than most that Ihave ever done. Necessity may not be the opposite of freedom, andperhaps a man is most free when, instead of producing motives, he couldonly say, "I am what I do." Then came the repercussion on theimaginative level. I felt as if I were a man of snow at long lastbeginning to melt. The melting was starting in my back--drip-drip andpresently trickle-trickle. I rather disliked the feeling.

The fox had been dislodged from Hegelian Wood and was now running in theopen, "with all the wo in the world," bedraggled and weary, houndsbarely a field behind. And nearly everyone was now (one way or another)in the pack; Plato, Dante, MacDonald, Herbert, Barfield, Tolkien, Dyson,Joy itself. Everyone and everything had joined the other side. Even myown pupil Griffiths--now Dom Bede Griffiths--though not yet himself abeliever, did his share. Once, when he and Barfield were lunching in myroom, I happened to refer to philosophy as "a subject". "It wasn't asubject to Plato," said Barfield, "it was a way." The quiet butfervent agreement of Griffiths, and the quick glance of understandingbetween these two, revealed to me my own frivolity. Enough had beenthought, and said, and felt, and imagined. It was about time thatsomething should be done.

For of course there had long been an ethic (theoretically) attached tomy Idealism. I thought the business of us finite and half-unreal soulswas to multiply the consciousness of Spirit by seeing the world fromdifferent positions while yet remaining qualitatively the same asSpirit; to be tied to a particular time and place and set ofcirc*mstances, yet there to will and think as Spirit itself does. Thiswas hard; for the very act whereby Spirit projected souls and a worldgave those souls different and competitive interests, so that there wasa temptation to selfishness. But I thought each of us had it in hispower to discount the emotional perspective produced by his ownparticular selfhood, just as we discount the optical perspectiveproduced by our position in space. To prefer my own happiness to myneighbour's was like thinking that the nearest telegraph post was reallythe largest. The way to recover, and act upon, this universal andobjective vision was daily and hourly to remember our true nature, toreascend or return into that Spirit which, in so far as we really wereat all, we still were. Yes; but I now felt I had better try to do it. Ifreed at last (in MacDonald's words) "something to be neither more norless nor other than done". An attempt at complete virtue must be made.

Really, a young Atheist cannot guard his faith too carefully. Dangerslie in wait for him on every side. You must not do, you must not eventry to do, the will of the Father unless you are prepared to "know ofthe doctrine". All my acts, desires, and thoughts were to be broughtinto harmony with universal Spirit. For the first time I examined myselfwith a seriously practical purpose. And there I found what appalled me;a zoo of lusts, a bedlam of ambitions, a nursery of fears, a hareem offondled hatreds. My name was legion.

Of course I could do nothing--I could not last out one hour--withoutcontinual conscious recourse to what I called Spirit. But the fine,philosophical distinction between this and what ordinary people call"prayer to God" breaks down as soon as you start doing it in earnest.Idealism can be talked, and even felt; it cannot be lived. It becamepatently absurd to go on thinking of "Spirit" as either ignorant of, orpassive to, my approaches. Even if my own philosophy were true, howcould the initiative lie on my side? My own analogy, as I now firstperceived, suggested the opposite: if Shakespeare and Hamlet could evermeet, it must be Shakespeare's doing.[8]Hamlet could initiate nothing.Perhaps, even now, my Absolute Spirit still differed in some way fromthe God of religion. The real issue was not, or not yet, there. The realterror was that if you seriously believed in even such a "God" or"Spirit" as I admitted, a wholly new situation developed. As the drybones shook and came together in that dreadful valley of Ezekiel's, sonow a philosophical theorem, cerebrally entertained, began to stir andheave and throw off its gravecloths, and stood upright and became aliving presence. I was to be allowed to play at philosophy no longer. Itmight, as I say, still be true that my "Spirit" differed in some wayfrom "the God of popular religion". My Adversary waived the point. Itsank into utter unimportance. He would not argue about it. He only said,"I am the Lord"; "I am that I am"; "I am".

[Footnote 8]i.e. Shakespeare could, in principle, make himself appear as Authorwithin the play, and write a dialogue between Hamlet and himself.The "Shakespeare" within the play would of course be at onceShakespeare and one of Shakespeare's creatures. It would bear someanalogy to Incarnation.

People who are naturally religious find difficulty in understanding thehorror of such a revelation. Amiable agnostics will talk cheerfullyabout "man's search for God". To me, as I then was, they might as wellhave talked about the mouse's search for the cat. The best image of mypredicament is the meeting of Mime and Wotan in the first act ofSiegfried; hier brauch' ich nicht Spärer noch Späher, Einsam willich... (I've no use for spies and snoopers. I would beprivate....)

Remember, I had always wanted, above all things, not to be "interferedwith". I had wanted (mad wish) "to call my soul my own". I had been farmore anxious to avoid suffering than to achieve delight. I had alwaysaimed at limited liabilities. The supernatural itself had been to me,first, an illicit dram, and then, as by a drunkard's reaction, nauseous.Even my recent attempt to live my philosophy had secretly (I now knew)been hedged round by all sorts of reservations. I had pretty well knownthat my ideal of virtue would never be allowed to lead me into anythingintolerably painful; I would be "reasonable". But now what had been anideal became a command; and what might not be expected of one?Doubtless, by definition, God was Reason itself. But would He also be"reasonable" in that other, more comfortable, sense? Not the slightestassurance on that score was offered me. Total surrender, the absoluteleap in the dark, were demanded. The reality with which no treaty can bemade was upon me. The demand was not even "All or nothing". I think thatstage had been passed, on the bus-top when I unbuckled my armour and thesnow-man started to melt. Now, the demand was simply "All".

You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night,feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, thesteady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not tomeet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In theTrinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and kneltand prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convertin all England. I did not then see what is now the most shining andobvious thing; the Divine humility which will accept a convert even onsuch terms. The Prodigal Son at least walked home on his own feet. Butwho can duly adore that Love which will open the high gates to aprodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and dartinghis eyes in every direction for a chance of escape? The words compelleintrare, compel them to come in, have been so abused by wicked men thatwe shudder at them; but, properly understood, they plumb the depth ofthe Divine mercy. The hardness of God is kinder than the softness ofmen, and His compulsion is our liberation.

XV. The Beginning

Aliud est de silvestri cacumine videre patriam pacis... et aliudtenere viam illuc ducentem.
ST. AUGUSTINE, Confessions, VII, xxi

For it is one thing to see the land of peace from a woodedridge... and another to tread the road that leads to it.

It must be understood that the conversion recorded in the last chapterwas only to Theism, pure and simple, not to Christianity. I knew nothingyet about the Incarnation. The God to whom I surrendered was sheerlynon-human.

It may be asked whether my terror was at all relieved by the thoughtthat I was now approaching the source from which those arrows of Joy hadbeen shot at me ever since childhood. Not in the least. No slightesthint was vouchsafed me that there ever had been or ever would be anyconnection between God and Joy. If anything, it was the reverse. I hadhoped that the heart of reality might be of such a kind that we can bestsymbolise it as a place; instead, I found it to be a Person. For all Iknew, the total rejection of what I called Joy might be one of thedemands, might be the very first demand, He would make upon me. Therewas no strain of music from within, no smell of eternal orchards at thethreshold, when I was dragged through the doorway. No kind of desire waspresent at all.

My conversion involved as yet no belief in a future life. I now numberit among my greatest mercies that I was permitted for several months,perhaps for a year, to know God and to attempt obedience without evenraising that question. My training was like that of the Jews, to whom Herevealed Himself centuries before there was a whisper of anything better(or worse) beyond the grave than shadowy and featureless Sheol. And Idid not dream even of that. There are men, far better men than I, whohave made immortality almost the central doctrine of their religion; butfor my own part I have never seen how a preoccupation with that subjectat the outset could fail to corrupt the whole thing. I had been broughtup to believe that goodness was goodness only if it were disinterested,and that any hope of reward or fear of punishment contaminated the will.If I was wrong in this (the question is really much more complicatedthan I then perceived) my error was most tenderly allowed for. I wasafraid that threats or promises would demoralise me; no threats orpromises were made. The commands were inexorable, but they were backedby no "sanctions". God was to be obeyed simply because he was God. Longsince, through the gods of Asgard, and later through the notion of theAbsolute, He had taught me how a thing can be revered not for what itcan do to us but for what it is in itself. That is why, though it was aterror, it was no surprise to learn that God is to be obeyed because ofwhat He is in Himself. If you ask why we should obey God, in the lastresort the answer is, "I am." To know God is to know that our obedienceis due to Him. In His nature His sovereignty de jure is revealed.

Of course, as I have said, the matter is more complicated than that. Theprimal and necessary Being, the Creator, has sovereignty de facto aswell as de jure. He has the power as well as the kingdom and theglory. But the de jure sovereignty was made known to me before thepower, the right before the might. And for this I am thankful. I thinkit is well, even now, sometimes to say to ourselves, "God is such thatif (per impossibile) his power could vanish and His other attributesremain, so that the supreme right were forever robbed of the suprememight, we should still owe Him precisely the same kind and degree ofallegiance as we now do." On the other hand, while it is true to saythat God's own nature is the real sanction of His commands, yet tounderstand this must, in the end, lead us to the conclusion that unionwith that Nature is bliss and separation from it horror. Thus Heaven andHell come in. But it may well be that to think much of either except inthis context of thought, to hypostatise them as if they had asubstantial meaning apart from the presence or absence of God, corruptsthe doctrine of both and corrupts us while we so think of them.

The last stage in my story, the transition from mere Theism toChristianity, is the one on which I am now least informed. Since it isalso the most recent, this ignorance may seem strange. I think there aretwo reasons. One is that as we grow older we remember the more distantpast better than what is nearer. But the other is, I believe, that oneof the first results of my Theistic conversion was a marked decrease(and high time, as all readers of this book will agree) in the fussyattentiveness which I had so long paid to the progress of my ownopinions and the states of my own mind. For many healthy extrovertsself-examination first begins with conversion. For me it was almost theother way round. Self-examination did of course continue. But it was (Isuppose, for I cannot quite remember) at stated intervals, and for apractical purpose; a duty, a discipline, an uncomfortable thing, nolonger a hobby or a habit. To believe and to pray were the beginning ofextroversion. I had been, as they say, "taken out of myself". If Theismhad done nothing else for me, I should still be thankful that it curedme of the time-wasting and foolish practice of keeping a diary. (Evenfor autobiographical purposes a diary is nothing like so useful as I hadhoped. You put down each day what you think important; but of course youcannot each day see what will prove to have been important in the longrun.[9])

[Footnote 9]The only real good I got from keeping a diary was that it taught me ajust appreciation of Boswell's amazing genius. I tried very hard toreproduce conversations, in some of which very amusing and strikingpeople had taken part. But none of these people came to life in thediary at all. Obviously something quite different from mere accuratereporting went to the presentation of Boswell's Langton, Beauclerk,Wilkes, and the rest.

As soon as I became a Theist I started attending my parish church onSundays and my college chapel on weekdays; not because I believed inChristianity, nor because I thought the difference between it and simpleTheism a small one, but because I thought one ought to "fly one's flag"by some unmistakable overt sign. I was acting in obedience to a (perhapsmistaken) sense of honour. The idea of churchmanship was to me whollyunattractive. I was not in the least anti-clerical, but I was deeplyanti-ecclesiastical. That curates and archdeacons and churchwardensshould exist, was admirable. They gratified my Jenkinian love ofeverything which has its own strong flavour. And (apart from Oldie) Ihad been fortunate in my clerical acquaintances; especially in Adam Fox,the Dean of Divinity at Magdalen, and in Arthur Barton (later Archbishopof Dublin) who had been our Rector at home in Ireland. (He, by the by,had once suffered under Oldie at Belsen. Speaking of Oldie's death, Ihad said to him, "Well, we shan't see him again." "You mean," heanswered with a grim smile, "we hope we shan't.") But though I likedclergymen as I liked bears, I had as little wish to be in the Church asin the zoo. It was, to begin with, a kind of collective; a wearisome"get-together" affair. I couldn't yet see how a concern of that sortshould have anything to do with one's spiritual life. To me, religionought to have been a matter of good men praying alone and meeting bytwos and threes to talk of spiritual matters. And then the fussy,time-wasting botheration of it all! the bells, the crowds, theumbrellas, the notices, the bustle, the perpetual arranging andorganising. Hymns were (and are) extremely disagreeable to me. Of allmusical instruments I liked (and like) the organ least. I have, too, asort of spiritual gaucherie which makes me unapt to participate in anyrite.

Thus my churchgoing was a merely symbolical and provisional practice. Ifit in fact helped to move me in the Christian direction, I was and amunaware of this. My chief companion on this stage of the road wasGriffiths, with whom I kept up a copious correspondence. Both nowbelieved in God, and were ready to hear more of Him from any source,Pagan or Christian. In my mind (I cannot now answer for his, and he hastold his own story admirably in The Golden String) the perplexingmultiplicity of "religions" began to sort itself out. The real clue hadbeen put into my hand by that hard-boiled Atheist when he said, "Rumthing, all that about the Dying God. Seems to have really happenedonce"; by him and by Barfield's encouragement of a more respectful, ifnot more delighted, attitude to Pagan myth. The question was no longerto find the one simply true religion among a thousand religions simplyfalse. It was rather, "Where has religion reached its true maturity?Where, if anywhere, have the hints of all Paganism been fulfilled?" Withthe irreligious I was no longer concerned; their view of life washenceforth out of court. As against them, the whole mass of those whohad worshipped--all who had danced and sung and sacrificed and trembledand adored--were clearly right. But the intellect and the conscience, aswell as the orgy and the ritual, must be our guide. There could be noquestion of going back to primitive, untheologised and unmoralised,Paganism. The God whom I had at last acknowledged was one, and wasrighteous. Paganism had been only the childhood of religion, or only aprophetic dream. Where was the thing full grown? or where was theawaking? (The Everlasting Man was helping me here.) There were reallyonly two answers possible: either in Hinduism or in Christianity.Everything else was either a preparation for, or else (in the Frenchsense) a vulgarisation of, these. Whatever you could find elsewhereyou could find better in one of these. But Hinduism seemed to have twodisqualifications. For one thing, it appeared to be not so much amoralised and philosophical maturity of Paganism as a mere oil-and-watercoexistence of philosophy side by side with Paganism unpurged; theBrahmin meditating in the forest, and, in the village a few miles away,temple-prostitution, sati, cruelty, monstrosity. And secondly, therewas no such historical claim as in Christianity. I was by now tooexperienced in literary criticism to regard the Gospels as myths. Theyhad not the mythical taste. And yet the very matter which they set downin their artless, historical fashion--those narrow, unattractive Jews,too blind to the mythical wealth of the Pagan world around them--wasprecisely the matter of the great myths. If ever a myth had become fact,had been incarnated, it would be just like this. And nothing else in allliterature was just like this. Myths were like it in one way. Historieswere like it in another. But nothing was simply like it. And no personwas like the Person it depicted; as real, as recognisable, through allthat depth of time, as Plato's Socrates or Boswell's Johnson (ten timesmore so than Eckermann's Goethe or Lockhart's Scott), yet also numinous,lit by a light from beyond the world, a god. But if a god--we are nolonger polytheists--then not a god, but God. Here and here only in alltime the myth must have become fact; the Word, flesh; God, Man. This isnot "a religion", nor "a philosophy". It is the summing up and actualityof them all.

As I have said, I speak of this last transition less certainly than ofany which went before it, and it may be that in the preceding paragraphI have mixed thoughts that came later. But I can hardly be wrong aboutthe main lines. Of one thing I am sure. As I drew near the conclusion, Ifelt a resistance almost as strong as my previous resistance to Theism.As strong, but shorter-lived, for I understood it better. Every step Ihad taken, from the Absolute to "Spirit" and from "Spirit" to "God", hadbeen a step towards the more concrete, the more imminent, the morecompulsive. At each step one had less chance "to call one's soul one'sown". To accept the Incarnation was a further step in the samedirection. It brings God nearer, or near in a new way. And this, Ifound, was something I had not wanted. But to recognise the ground formy evasion was of course to recognise both its shame and its futility. Iknow very well when, but hardly how, the final step was taken. I wasdriven to Whipsnade one sunny morning. When we set out I did not believethat Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did.Yet I had not exactly spent the journey in thought. Nor in greatemotion. "Emotional" is perhaps the last word we can apply to some ofthe most important events. It was more like when a man, after longsleep, still lying motionless in bed, becomes aware that he is nowawake. And it was, like that moment on top of the bus, ambiguous.Freedom, or necessity? Or do they differ at their maximum? At thatmaximum a man is what he does; there is nothing of him left over oroutside the act. As for what we commonly call Will, and what we commonlycall Emotion, I fancy these usually talk too loud, protest too much, tobe quite believed, and we have a secret suspicion that the great passionor the iron resolution is partly a put-up job.

They have spoiled Whipsnade since then. Wallaby Wood, with the birdssinging overhead and the bluebells underfoot and the Wallabies hoppingall round one, was almost Eden come again.

But what, in conclusion, of Joy? for that, after all, is what the storyhas mainly been about. To tell you the truth, the subject has lostnearly all interest for me since I became a Christian. I cannot, indeed,complain, like Wordsworth, that the visionary gleam has passed away. Ibelieve (if the thing were at all worth recording) that the old stab,the old bittersweet, has come to me as often and as sharply since myconversion as at any time of my life whatever. But I now know that theexperience, considered as a state of my own mind, had never had the kindof importance I once gave it. It was valuable only as a pointer tosomething other and outer. While that other was in doubt, the pointernaturally loomed large in my thoughts. When we are lost in the woods thesight of a signpost is a great matter. He who first sees it cries,"Look!" The whole party gathers round and stares. But when we have foundthe road and are passing signposts every few miles, we shall not stopand stare. They will encourage us and we shall be grateful to theauthority that set them up. But we shall not stop and stare, or notmuch; not on this road, though their pillars are of silver and theirlettering of gold. "We would be at Jerusalem."

Not, of course, that I don't often catch myself stopping to stare atroadside objects of even less importance.

[End of Surprised by Joy, by C. S. Lewis]