Section II

Till We Have Faces:

The Work in Context

 

X

Poet of the Teens and Twenties:

The Struggling Imagination

One way to come to know Till We Have Faces is close up, by reading the work attentively, taking into account its characters, structure, symbols, and themes. This way is necessary, and it must occur first, as it has in this study. But to understand and appreciate Till We Have Faces fully, it is necessary also to step back and view it from a distance, in the broader perspective of Lewis’s works and life as a whole. It stands as the culmination of themes and images that appear throughout Lewis’s previous works, but also as a striking contrast to earlier tendencies. The remaining five chapters of this book place Till We Have Faces in context. They offer a brief survey of Lewis’s thought and works, focusing, for each decade, on a key work which has useful affinities to Till We Have Faces in theme or method—Dymer, The Pilgrim’s Regress, The Great Divorce, Surprised by Joy, and Letters to Malcolm. They trace the ongoing tension in Lewis between reason and the imagination, and between reason and the self or the subjective, and the changes in Lewis’s attitude toward them late in his life.

Owen Barfield, writing shortly after Lewis’s death, mentions puzzling over what he terms the “individual essence” of his old friend: “I first met him in 1919, and the puzzlement has had to do above all with the great change that took place in him between the years 1930 and 1940—a change which roughly coincided with his conversion to Theism and then to Christianity."¹ Barfield sensed, begin-[< p. 88]ning at that time, a studied effort by Lewis to direct his attention away from himself:

At a certain stage in his life he deliberately ceased to take any interest in himself except as a kind of spiritual alumnus taking his moral finals. . . . What began as deliberate choice became at length (as he had no doubt always intended it should) an ingrained and effortless habit of soul. Self-knowledge, for him, had come to mean recognition of his weaknesses and shortcomings and nothing more. Anything beyond that he sharply suspected, both in himself and in others, as a symptom of spiritual megalomania.²

Though Barfield comments that this change does not appear to be inevitably or even naturally connected with Lewis’s conversion, it does seem to be quite directly related to two of Lewis’s concerns at the time of his conversion: subjugation of pride and belief in moral law. About the time of his conversion, Lewis wrote to Arthur Greeves about pride, which he regarded as his “besetting sin”: “There seems to be no end to it. Depth under depth of self-love and self admiration.”³ The solution is what Barfield wrote about, Lewis’s keeping his attention directed toward things outside himself. About the same time Lewis came to accept the existence of moral order and the natural law—both of which are external and objective—and to recognize them as crucial to a proper understanding of life and the universe. These areas, both related to his conversion, involve a similar diminishing of the importance of the self and directing of attention toward external matters of greater importance than the self.

Barfield’s concern—and I think it has not been given sufficient attention in considerations of Lewis’s work—is that a consciousness of self, and of the inevitability of a degree of subjectivity, is necessary to proper understanding even of “objective” things, and that Lewis’s failure to include self in his thinking was an inhibiting factor in his thought and work. Barfield does not indicate that this attitude changed later in Lewis’s life. It appears to me, however, that for the final decade and a half of his life Lewis gradually [< p. 89] shifted his emphasis to give fuller consideration to the self and the subjective, simultaneous with and related to an altered emphasis on reason and imagination, all of which leads to a noticeably different approach and tone in his later works.

Early in his life Lewis was pulled one way by rationalist tendencies, the other by romantic and imaginative ones. The rationalist grew out of home, family, and training. His father, for all his emotionalism, which so embarrassed Lewis, was a lawyer; his mother was a mathematician—both professions require and emphasize cool, clear-headed logic. His early training was classical, with the emphasis on rigor of thought and expression that implies. But it was the two years under the tutelage of W. T. Kirkpatrick, being prepared for the Oxford entrance exams, that turned Lewis from a clear thinker to a thoroughgoing rationalist. Kirkpatrick—a nineteenth-century rationalist, fiercely logical except for his habit of exchanging his weekday suit for a nicer one on Sundays—taught Lewis that language was intended to promote knowledge and understanding: “The idea that human beings should exercise their vocal organs for any purpose except that of communicating or discovering truth was to him preposterous. The most casual remark was taken as a summons to disputation."⁴ Lewis illustrates with an account of his initial conversation with Kirkpatrick after Lewis had remarked on the “wildness” of the Surrey scenery: “‘Stop!’ shouted Kirk with a suddenness that made me jump. ‘What do you mean by wildness and what grounds had you for not expecting it?’"  After Lewis fumbled for a response, Kirkpatrick continued:

On what had I based (but he pronounced it baized) my expectations about the Flora and Geology of Surrey? Was it maps, or photographs, or books? I could produce none. It had, heaven help me, never occurred to me that what I called my thoughts needed to be “baized” on anything. Kirk once more drew a conclusion—without the slightest sign of emotion, but equally without the slightest concession to what I thought good manners: “Do you not see, then, that you had no right to have any opinion whatever on the subject?” (p. 129; Ch. 9)

Knowledge, then, is to be grounded in sensory experience of the world or factual, “objective” data about it, and in [< p. 90] reasonable reflection upon the data so obtained. As Lewis put it, such talk and such thinking were like “red beef and strong beer” to him (p. 131; Ch. 9). He adopted Kirkpatrick’s rationalism, his “ruthless dialectic” (p. 131; Ch. 9), and his habit of “talking for victory.”⁵

The romantic tendencies arose from Lewis’s response to nature and from his reading—his parents, he says, had no such romantic leanings: “Neither had ever listened for the horns of elfland” (p. 12; Ch. 1). The country he grew up in, Lewis notes, “had everything to encourage a romantic bent, had indeed done so ever since I first looked at the unattainable Green Hills through the nursery window” (p.146; Ch. 10). Looking northeast from the Holywood Hills one saw Belfast and the Lough, with all the romance of the sea. South and east one saw a different, but equally attractive, world: “And having seen it, blame me if you can for being a romantic. For here is the thing itself, utterly irresistible, the way to the world’s end, the land of longing, the breaking and blessing of hearts. You are looking across what may be called, in a certain sense, the plain of Down, and seeing beyond it the Mourne Mountains” (p. 148; Ch. 10). What from earliest childhood he had felt about the distant mountains was brought into focus by books: Longfellow’s Saga of King Olaf and Arthur Rackham’s drawings for Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods, and other books as he discovered them, created a love of “northernness” and an intense longing for that which lay beyond the world he could know: “Instantly I was uplifted into huge regions of northern sky, I desired with almost sickening intensity something never to be described (except that it is cold, spacious, severe, pale, and remote)” (p. 23; Ch. 1). Rationalism and dialectic are not incompatible with romance, imagination, and myth: Plato, for example, combined them fruitfully and reached the highest levels of achievement in both. In Lewis the combination is less easy and, for a long while, less complete. Although he reaches very high levels in each, and unites the two in valuable ways, there remains a sense of perhaps an overcommitment to the dialectical which long prevents [< p. 91] in practice the full understanding of myth Lewis advances in theory.

The tension between the rational and the romantic appears clearly in Lewis’s early letters to Arthur Greeves, the short lyric poems collected in Spirits in Bondage, and the narrative poem Dymer. The letters to Greeves show his indulgence in romantic emotionalism side by side with a rationalist rebellion against religion and “illusion.” They are dominated by the love of books, northern myth, and romantic longing which were the shared elements in their friendship. “Both knew the stab of Joy,” Lewis wrote in Surprised by Joy, “and, . . . for both, the arrow was shot from the North” (p. 126; Ch. 8). Lewis mentions in one letter the “exalted” feeling he receives from reading Malory and goes on in his next letter to clarify what he means:

Have you ever sat over the fire late, late at night when you are very drowzy & muddle headed, and it is no use trying to go on with your book? Everything seems like a dream, you are absolutely contented, and “out of the world.” Anything seems possible, and all sorts of queer ideas float through your mind & sort of vaguely thrill you but only mildly & calmly. It is in this sort of mood that the quaint, old mystical parts of Malory are exactly suitable: you can read a chapter or two in a sort of dream & find the forests of “Logres & of Lyonesse” very agreeable at such a time—at least I do.⁶

Lewis’s rationalism appears infrequently in these letters, largely because Greeves did not share Lewis’s love of ideas and dialectic. Occasionally the rationalist comes through, often immediately after an emotionalist passage like that above, demonstrating the tension and diversity of Lewis’s thinking at the time. The letter cited above continues,

You ask me my religious views: you know, I think, that I beleive [sic] in no religion. There is absolutely no proof for any of them, and from a philosophical standpoint Christianity is not even the best. All religions, that is, all mythologies to give them their proper name are merely man’s own invention—Christ as much as Loki. Primitive man found himself surrounded by all sorts of terrible things he didn’t understand—thunder, pestilence, snakes etc: what more natural than to suppose that these were animated by evil spirits trying [< p. 92] to torture him. These he kept off by cringing to them, singing songs and making sacrifices etc.

The young Lewis, here, holds seriously the allegorical, post-logical naturalistic explanations of myth he would later undercut when they appear in the words of Arnom, the enlightened priest in Till We Have Faces. The letter goes on:

Thus religion, that is to say mythology grew up. Often, too, great men were regarded as gods after their death—such as Heracles or Odin: thus after the death of a Hebrew philosopher Yeshua (whose name we have corrupted into Jesus) he became regarded as a god, a cult sprang up, which was afterwards connected with the ancient Hebrew Jahweh-worship, and so Christianity came into being—one mythology among many, but the one that we happen to have been brought up in.

One notes in all this Lewis’s emphasis upon a lack of proof and his acceptance of it as “the recognised scientific account of the growth of religions.” His thinking is, at this point, very much grounded in reason, realism, and materialism: “Of course, mind you, I am not laying down as a certainty that there is nothing outside the material world: considering the discoveries that are always being made, this would be foolish. Anything MAY exist: but until we know that it does, we can’t make any assumptions."⁷ And we would come to such knowledge only through the evidences of sense experience and experimentation and through conclusions drawn from logical inference.

There is a similar bifurcation and tension between rationalism and the romantic in Lewis’s first book of poetry, Spirits in Bondage, published in 1919. Lewis was at this time a materialistic rationalist, as the letter to Greeves quoted above indicates; yet a dominant theme of this “Cycle of Lyrics” is a longing for a romantic world quite at odds with his epistemology. In one of the letters to Greeves, Lewis asserts that the themes of Spirits in Bondage are the malevolence of nature and the remoteness and essential goodness of God;⁸ but the poems in fact seem to emphasize instead a rejection of conventional ideas about God, an appreciation and acceptance of the beauty of nature, and a longing to [< p. 93] escape from the suffering caused by human cruelty to the comfort of a romantic paradise. The title itself reflects that ambivalence: the published title is a slight modification of Lewis’s original choice, “Spirits in Prison,” a biblical allusion (I Peter 3:19—"he went and preached to the spirits in prison") with Platonic overtones; it forms an ironic contrast to the rationalism and naturalistic realism Lewis professes to be his chief concern. In its “enlightened” rationalism on the one hand and deep sense of longing for a world of the spirit on the other, the collection provides an early and immature version of themes which would be treated much more satisfactorily in Till We Have Faces.

Rationalism is integral to Lewis’s development of his themes, especially of the “Bondage” theme. The “Spirits” of the title are those of humankind, especially “The yearning, high, rebellious spirit of man” which has never rested, since life began, “From striving with red Nature and her ways."⁹ The “Bondage” of the title refers to the imprisonment of that noble spirit in a world of cruelty, oppression, and evil, which constantly attempts to beat down and crush it. “In Prison,” for example, is a protest against “the hopeless life that ran / For ever in a circling path / From death to death since all began” (p. 31). “Ode for New Year’s Day,” similarly, is not the celebration of newness and hope typical of poems for the new year; instead it affirms that there is no escape from the “red wrath” being poured upon this deformed world (p. 24). At one time the poet, like other people, raised his voice in prayer and complaint and cursing. Now, however, he knows better:

I am grown wiser, knowing that our own hearts

Have made a phantom called the Good, while a few years have sped

Over a little planet. And what should the great Lord know of it

Who tosses the dust of chaos and gives the suns their parts? (p. 25)

Whatever divine being exists is, somehow, at once a clockmaker god, who set the worlds in motion and withdrew, unhearing and uninterested, and an antagonistic god, who [< p. 94] covers the sky with “clouds of God’s hate” (p. 23). Such self-contradictory rationalism is much less convincing and insidious than the naturalism and benevolent humanism of the Fox’s Stoic attitudes in Till We Have Faces.

The two themes of the collection, “Spirits” and “Bondage,” are united in “De Profundis.” The bondage results from the inescapable strength and malignity of the divine, who defeats whatever wisdom and joy human beings attain: “And suddenly the earth grew black with wrong, / Our hope was crushed and silenced was our song” (p. 33). The only response more positive than to “curse our Master ere we die” is to assert human independence—"Yet I will not bow down to thee nor love thee"—and maintain the dignity of the human spirit: “Our love, our hope, our thirsting for the right, / Our mercy and long seeking of the light, / Shall we change these for thy relentless might?” (p. 34). One finds all of these sentiments in Orual, but deepened by Lewis’s subsequent experience with life and as a writer.

Woven throughout the rationalism is a deep strain of romanticism, of romantic rebellion and of romantic longing for escape. The rebelliousness comes out particularly in “The Philosopher.” It is clearly the poem of a youthful writer, unhappy with the state of the world and searching for encompassing answers to ultimate questions:

Who shall be our prophet then,

Chosen from all the sons of men

To lead his fellows on the way

Of hidden knowledge, delving deep

To nameless mysteries that keep

Their secret from the solar day!

Or who shall pierce with surer eye

This shifting veil of bittersweet

And find the real things that lie

Beyond this turmoil, which we greet

With such a wasted wealth of tears?

(p. 43)

 

It also shows the typical distrust of youths for the knowledge or answers of their elders, and—interestingly, from a rationalist—a romantic disenchantment with reason as a means of securing answers. The narrator asks if the prophet [< p. 95] being sought is an elder “In his solitary tower” with eyes “dim and blind” (p. 44), and replies it is not.

 

His monstrous books can never know

The secret we would find.

But let our seer be young and kind

And fresh and beautiful of show,

And taken ere the lustyhead

And rapture of his youth be dead,

Ere the gnawing, peasant reason

School him over-deep in treason

To the ancient high estate

Of his fancy’s principate,

That he may live a perfect whole,

A mask of the eternal soul,

And cross at last the shadowy bar

To where the ever-living are.

(pp. 44-45)

“Seeing” here is a direct, almost intuitive knowledge, almost Wordsworthian, available to the young and innocent in an idealized world (“ancient high estate”). Wholeness comes not through pure reason, or the union of reason and imagination, but through total commitment to the imaginative: by such wholehearted embracing of the fancy, or imagination, one’s life can become a “mask” revealing the eternal soul. “Mask” here suggests not a barrier to or a hiding of the truth, as it will in later works, but “an accurate reflection of.” Similarly, the “shifting veil” in the earlier lines suggests not rationalist barriers raised against sight but the inevitable limitedness of the here and now, a rather contradictory image from one who purports to be a materialist and rationalist.

Lewis himself, in the later poems of the collection, becomes in part such a young seer as the poem asks for. The last section of poems, entitled “The Escape” (from “The Prison House,” title of the first section), concentrates on the sweet desires experienced by romantic pilgrims as they long for a romantic country far from such confines. The “Prologue” to the entire volume places the emphasis not on imprisonment, but release. As singing of their homeland enabled old Phoenician men sailing to the ends of the earth [< p. 96] to forget their toil and burden, so these poems will give comfort and courage to those who struggle through life desiring something better:

In my coracle of verses I will sing of lands unknown,

Flying from the scarlet city where a Lord that knows no pity

Mocks the broken people praying round his iron throne,

--Sing about the Hidden Country fresh and full of quiet green.

Sailing over seas uncharted to a port that none has seen.

(p.8)

The “lands unknown” are either “somewhere, somewhere past the Northern snow” (“Song of the Pilgrims,” p. 69) or “down the western ways” ("Hesperus,” p. 95). Such lands are a “Country of Dreams! / Beyond the tide of the ocean, . . . near to the end of day, / Full of dim woods and streams” (“Death in Battle,” p. 106). They are lands associated with fairies and other “lovely folk” (“World’s Desire,” p. 104), with “Immortal shapes of beauty clear” (“Ballade Mystique,” p. 79), with “spirits that have . . . seen the bright footprints of God” (“Song,” p. 74), and with “archangels fresh from sight of God” (“ ‘ Our Daily Bread,’ ” p. 86).

Only glimpses of that “Hidden Country” enable one to go on through the prison house of life. In the most haunting and powerful poem in the collection, “Dungeon Grates,” the poet reflects on the burden, the pain, “The nightmare march of unrelenting fate,” and concludes,

 

I think that he must die thereof unless

Ever and again across the dreariness

There came a sudden glimpse of spirit faces,

A fragrant breath to tell of flowery places

And wider oceans, breaking on the shore

For which the hearts of men are always sore.

(p. 40)

 

Such “sudden glimpses” are not the result of prayer, or fasting, or wisdom; rather, they are a reward given to the receptive romantic spirit:

Only the strange power

Of unsought Beauty in some casual hour

Can build a bridge of light or sound or form

To lead you out of all this strife and storm.

(p. 41)              [<p. 97]

 

The experience of a sudden beam of “larger light” leaping out of beauty turns all the surroundings into gold and reveals a truth seven times more true than ordinary truth.

 

            For one little moment we are one

With the eternal stream of loveliness

That flows so calm, aloof from all distress

Yet leaps and lives around us as a fire

Making us faint with overstrong desire

To sport and swim for ever in its deep—

Only a moment.    

(p. 41)

It is but a moment, but it is enough: “We know we are not made of mortal stuff. / And we can bear all trials that come after, /. . . For we have seen the Glory—we have seen” (pp. 41-42). This is one of the fullest descriptions Lewis ever gave of the experience he later called “Joy”; it demonstrates impressively the strength and importance of the romantic strain in Lewis’s life even at a time when he was training himself as a rationalist. It also illuminates the happiness and sustaining power Psyche received from her longings for the castle in the grey mountains of Glome.

Spirits in Bondage is uneven as a collection of poetry: there are a few gems, usually brief passages rather than entire poems. Its strength is expression of youthful emotions rather than handling of poetic skills. Its best quality as poetry is its visual imagery, as in “How He Saw Angus the God”:

—That little wood of hazel and tall pine

And youngling fir, where oft we have loved to see

The level beams of early morning shine

    Freshly from tree to tree.

Though in the denser wood there’s many a pool

Of deep and night-born shadow lingers yet

Where the new-wakened flowers are damp and cool

                And the long grass is wet.

(p. 89)

The visualizing tendency Lewis calls attention to later as the heart of his imaginative ability was with him already [< p. 98] as a youth. Despite weaknesses, however, the collection shows a great deal about Lewis’s attitudes and experiences through his teens, particularly the tension between rationalism and romanticism, which stays with him through much of his life. At this point they are definitely in juxtaposition: the two appear in separate poems, pulling in opposite directions, and are in no sense moving toward a unity or even cooperation with each other.

That juxtaposition continues, in slightly altered form, seven years later, in the long narrative poem Dymer. Dymer was published in 1926, but Lewis worked on it for many years, beginning with a prose version in December 1916; it is of value, therefore, for the way it reinterprets themes and images of the previous decade in light of Lewis’s positions in the mid-twenties. But it is of greater significance, in this study, for its anticipations of central themes, character types, and figures of speech in Till We Have Faces.

            Dymer is a review and modification of Lewis’s earlier romanticism, both the romantic protest and idealism and the romantic longing and emotional indulgence. The hero, Dymer, is engaged in a search for meaning and purpose, first by throwing off restraint and authority, and subsequently by pursuing “sweet desire.” Both aspects of his search end in frustration and disillusionment. His example of rebellion is followed by others and unleashes a wave of anarchy and tyranny which appalls him when he learns about it. Sweet desire draws him to a paradisal wood and an encounter with a delectable maiden; but the harshness and evil of the world convince him that the longing created by natural beauty is a deception and a fraud. A narrow escape from death sobers and matures Dymer, and leads him to accept nature for the concrete reality she is and to conclude that the romantic worlds epitomized in his dream at the magician’s house are only projections of his own fantasies and wishes. He realizes that his longings are not for nature but for the eternal Spirit, and he finds strength in the assurance that “the gods,” unreachable and disinterested as they may be, do share all experiences of human beings, including woe and pain. Dymer is finally able to accept re-[< p. 99]sponsibility for his actions and to recognize that, having misused the time available to him, he must make some effort to “undo” what he has done amiss. In a type of death (it takes place in a graveyard), Dymer’s spirit soars upward to a ruinous land in which he encounters a monster, the offspring of his union with the spiritual maiden earlier in the poem, engages willingly in combat with the monster, and is killed by it. His death, however, transforms the wasteland into a paradise and the monster into a god.

By the mid-1920s Lewis had rejected his earlier materialistic rationalism and had become an Idealist. This change led to changes in Lewis’s thinking about the romantic, but did not eliminate or resolve the tension between it and the rational. The handling of romantic longing in Dymer reflects significant differences from Spirits in Bondage. As Dymer leaves the regimented society of the Perfect City, he enters a forest, hears music, and experiences a pang of longing: “So sharp it was, so sure a path it found, / Soulward with stabbing wounds of bitter sound."¹⁰ His encounter with the maiden in the darkness of “a world not made for seeing” (II, 28) is a coming upon “unsought Beauty in some casual hour” like that in the earlier “Dungeon Grates.” But Lewis now regards the Western Garden imagery, so prominent in Spirits in Bondage, as illusory. The woods and paradisal palace of Cantos II and III are accentuated in the magical dreams of Canto VII: such places are lies, are only projections of inner romantic desires, and are ridiculed by the very spelling of “the good countrie” (VII, 23).¹¹ The longings themselves, for those who experience “whisperings at the heart, soul-sickening gleams / Of infinite desire” (VIII, 11), are not illusory, but they must point one past nature and illusory images to the world of pure Spirit. It was true Spirit that Dymer wooed and longed for when he thought he longed for nature and its “holiness” (VIII, 10). It was true Spirit he mated with in the sudden encounter with the maiden in the palace; he did not recognize what she really was, however, because she came in the shape he called for—as sensuous romantic experience rather than Truth—and because he did not ask her name, did not seek to know her as she really [< p. 100] was (III, 10; VIII, 6). The emphasis on Spirit is an effort to eliminate romantic trappings while retaining a “deromanticized” longing, which strongly suggests a continued, and perhaps increasing, tension between the romantic and the rational.

Two passages in letters Lewis wrote to Arthur Greeves in 1918, though written a good deal earlier than the published version of Dymer, are helpful in getting hold of the attitudes and ideas Lewis put into the poem. The first was written about Spirits in Bondage, but it is in fact more applicable to Dymer. The theme of his forthcoming volume, Lewis tells Greeves, is mainly “the idea that I mentioned to you before—that nature is wholly diabolical & malevolent and that God, if he exists, is outside of and in opposition to the cosmic arrangements.”¹² Dymer, more than Spirits in Bondage, develops the Platonic theme, or Lewis’s adaptation of a Platonic theme, implicit in the earlier title and the ideas about nature expressed there. Dymer, like all humanity, is imprisoned within his mortal body; he must seek to become free of it, to keep his attention on higher things. But that effort is hindered by the world, especially by nature, which is “diabolical” in that its attractions and beauties create longings and satisfactions which invite one to be content with the world and this life. Natural evils—the disasters of storm and human brutality—convey the truth about nature’s malevolence, from which God is separate and to which his goodness is opposed. It is a neat, abstractly satisfying means of dealing with the problems of suffering and evil in the world, and a good deal more sophisticated than the simple naturalism of Spirits in Bondage.

A few months later Lewis described to Greeves “The Redemption of Ask,” a shortened, versified account of the Dymer myth.

The main idea is that of development by self-destruction, both of individuals & species (as nature produces man only to conquer her [Nature], & man produces a future & higher generation to conquer the ideals of the last, or again as an individual produces a nobler mood to undo all that today’s has done).¹³  [< p. 101]

The comments are applicable to the version of Dymer published some eight years later, so long as the evolutionary ring of “development” is not allowed to overshadow “by self- destruction.” Lewis’s real interest in the mid-1920s was not evolution but sacrifice, particularly the voluntary self-sacrifice found in the northern myths which he loved throughout his youth and which provide a context and set the tone for Dymer. Thus the epigraph taken from the collection of Icelandic runes entitled the Havamal helps clarify the meaning of Dymer: “Nine nights I hung upon the Tree, wounded with the spear as an offering to Odin, myself sacrificed to myself.”¹⁴ The god Odin, in order to gain wisdom through acquisition of the magic runes, hanged himself on the ash Yggdrasil as an offering to himself, and wounded himself with his own spear. It is a symbolic enactment of the idea—central to Dymer—that development can be attained only by self-sacrifice and self-destruction.

Dymer unites the heroic individualism of the northern myths with an emphasis on personal responsibility which bears some resemblance to the ideas of Existentialism a decade or two later—though Lewis was in no sense an Existentialist, either then or later. One such parallel occurs when Dymer attempts to deny his responsibility for the anarchy which followed his rebellion: “What have I done? Wronged whom? I never knew. / What’s Bran to me? I had my deed to do / And ran out by myself, alone and free” (V, 11). The poem implies, however, as Sartre will later, that to choose something as right for oneself assumes it would be right for others to choose that thing, too.¹⁵ While Dymer is not responsible for what others do, he is responsible for the act of setting the example he did. Also, like the Existentialists, the poem affirms existence by virtue of choices made. The song of a lark symbolizes the voice of the world, “Of beings beyond number, each and all / Singing I AM. Each of itself made choice / And was” (V, 28). The poem holds that individuals, too, are determined by their choices and responsible for the choices they make, even if, or even though, no guidance is available for making those choices well: Dymer asks, “Must things of dust / Guess their own way in the [< p. 102] dark?”; the maiden (Spirit) replies, “They must” (VIII, 12). And Dymer finally does accept such responsibility: “What would have been / The strength of all my days I have refused / And plucked the stalk, too hasty, in the green” (VIII, 16).

Having accepted responsibility for his choices and actions, Dymer also accepts, and is prepared to face, his destiny. The conclusion of the poem mixes Platonism and northern pessimism with the “existential” quality illustrated above. Having died repeatedly in spirit, through bad values and poor choices, Dymer at last approaches physical death, the time at which he will “cast [his] fetters” and leave this dream world (VIII, 19). Before that death, however, he feels himself capable of one heroic, though presumably fatal, act: “My course is run, / All but some deed still waiting to be done” (IX, 10). He must recognize the ruin he has made of his life and confront the monstrous spiritual nature he has created (given birth to) by his choices and actions. He does a noble deed and dies in the effort, but dies heroically, in keeping with the endings of northern myths. By sacrifice of himself to himself—in that the monster is his own offspring—Dymer achieves a deed which ennobles Mankind and enables “great good” (IX, 35) to enter the world.

A careful examination of Dymer reveals a number of affinities with Till We Have Faces. First, the two works share basic imagery. The masks of the Priests and temple girls of Till We Have Faces are anticipated by the masks in the Magician’s house and in Dymer’s dream (VI, 13; VII, 28), and their antithesis, the frequent “unmaskings” which reveal things as they really are (IV, 6; VII, 26; and IX, 9). The image of the veil occurs often in the poem, though as a metaphor for illusion or delusion, not the rich symbol it becomes in the later work. Thus Dyrmer says, after his renewed experience with nature which makes him confident that he will remain henceforth free of illusions, “No veils should hide the truth” (VI, 2); and as a phantom of the maiden appears in his magic-induced dream a bit later, Dymer says, “Her sweetness drew / A veil before my eyes” (VII, 21).

Lewis also gives to Dymer many of the attitudes he [< p. 103] later gives to Orual. Dymer, unable to find the maiden and shocked by the actual carnage the example of his personal rebellion unleashed, sinks into despair and pessimism: “There stood the concave, vast, unfriendly night, / And over him the scroll of stars unfurled” (V, 7). His heart is clouded by “deep world-despair” (V, 3), and he is repelled by the “Infinite malice” of nature (V, 14). He pours forth accusations against “the gods,” very much like those of Orual: “And I suppose / They, they up there, the old contriving powers, / They knew it all the time” (V, 9). Like Orual, Dymer curses and rejects the gods: “I have seen the world stripped naked and I know. / Great God, take back your world. I will have none / Of all your glittering gauds but death alone” (V, 15). In Till We Have Faces the allusions to Job put Orual and her accusations against the gods into proper perspective; Dymer, lacking such allusions, relies on simple irony to accomplish the same thing: throughout the world and universe, orderly patterns of action carry on as before, “And no one knew that Dymer in his scales / Had weighed all these and found them nothing worth” (V, 17). Dymer, like Orual, must come to realize that his indictment of the gods and justice is a projection of his inability to accept his own guilt. He must come to know himself and deal with what he has made of his life in order to understand his place in the order of things.

Basic character types in Dymer and Till We Have Faces are related as well. Psyche, with her almost otherworldly beauty and goodness, is parallel in some respects to the maiden who comes to Dymer in the palace. The sentry’s description of the maiden could almost as well be applied to Psyche:

 

Her ancient smile

Made glad the sons of heaven. She loved to chase

The springtime round the world. To all your race

She was a sudden quivering in the wood

Or a new thought springing in solitude.

(IX, 12)

 

Dymer was searching for the Good, for Truth; for that divine Beauty which inspires the artist to paint and the poet to [< p. 104] write. In meeting the maiden, he has found that for which he sought, though he does not realize it or seek to know her for what she is. After leaving her, he is prevented from returning to her by the hag, who is parallel in a number of ways to Orual as Ungit. The hag is described as “a dark mass” (III, 11), a many-breasted woman (III, 13), “the old, old matriarchal dreadfulness” (III, 23), and “that frightful woman shape” (VI, 18). The hag, like the maiden, is a true symbol, which cannot be fixed or limited to one specific interpretation. She may be a type of devouring female, a Lilith figure opposed to life and beauty, or she may be a projection of Dymer’s own feelings, now passion-filled and possessive, which prevent a renewal of the innocence and openness of the initial encounter—but in any case the general similarity to Orual and Ungit is sharp and revealing.

More basic than such similarities in imagery and character, however, is the similarity of their myths. Dymer develops a personal myth which seems to have haunted Lewis for years, if not decades. Owen Barfield suggests that Till We Have Faces is a working out of the same myth: “Much later in . . . Till We Have Faces, he seems to me to have succeeded in combining the old myth of Cupid and Psyche with this personal myth.”¹⁶ The personal myth to which he refers is that of a person engendering a monster which subsequently destroys its parent and is transformed through that sacrificial death. Thus Orual, early in her life, encounters the Good, the Beautiful, the True, embodied in Psyche; her efforts to possess Psyche, however, cut her off from Psyche and prevent their reunion. Through her possessiveness and jealousy, Orual gives birth to a monster, the ugly, jealous Orual of her natural self. She at last recognizes it as a monster of her own making and confronts it; she dies to it, and this death enables the monstrous Orual to be transformed into the beautiful, spiritual Orual who then resembles Psyche. The novel is a much richer, more mature, more aesthetically and imaginatively satisfying handling of the myth than Dymer, but it is essentially the same myth, a personal myth which grew over the decades and provides [< p. 105] one of the strongest unifying threads in Lewis’s life and works.

The development of this personal myth in Dymer has great power, and the similarities of the poem to Till We Have Faces are fascinating and instructive, but the work has significant weaknesses as poetry, especially weaknesses in metaphor.¹⁷ It can safely be said that effective use of metaphor, the most imaginative of poetic figures, is essential to a poet and to fine poetry. What metaphors occur in Dymer are simple and trite, as the comparison of a glance to a small bird landing upon something, of time to an ocean, and of a task to a road, all in the opening stanza of Canto I:

 

You stranger, long before your glance can light

Upon these words, time will have washed away

The moment when I first took pen to write,

With all my road before me.

They are typical of the metaphors in the poem, decorative, adding to the diction, but not integral to the purpose of the poem. The figures which are integral, which carry the creative burden, are similes:

He yawned, and a voluptuous laziness

Tingled down all his spine and loosed his knees,

Slow-drawn, like an invisible caress.

(1, 9)

The similes are too frequent and call attention to themselves, but they are consistently more effective than the metaphors. The simile is generally considered less imaginative than metaphor—closer to analogy, with a more reasoned and calculated dimension, though in poets like Dante and Spenser the images in which a simile is elaborated, and even the comparisons themselves, are fresh and highly imaginative. But Lewis’s similes are not those of Dante or Spenser (though his heavy reliance on similes in a narrative poem probably imitates them)—Lewis’s have less naturalness, inevitability, and sensory effect than theirs, and give more sense of being thought out as illustrative material. Similar and related to the tension of reason versus the romantic in the content, therefore, is a tension between reason [< p. 106] and the imagination in the style. Even here, in an early poem, Lewis does not seem to give free rein to his imagination. From early on, Lewis’s imagination is held back, perhaps more than he himself ever realized, by deeply ingrained rationalistic tendencies and methods.

It is noteworthy, finally, that in Spirits in Bondage and Dymer, Lewis is writing about himself. The poems are in no sense allegorical, and Dymer is not Lewis in the same way that John in The Pilgrim’s Regress is, but they do reflect Lewis’s early searchings and sorting of values and ideas, including perhaps his own struggle to be a poet. Marjorie Milne identifies as a central motif “the poet’s relation to his Muse.” In Dymer’s death and the apotheosis of the beast into a god, she suggests, the poet’s (and thus, surely, Lewis’s) “old romantic longings pass through the grave and gate of death and new and vital poetic powers are released."¹⁸ There is as yet none of the reluctance to direct his attention to himself that Barfield saw arising in the next decade. By concentrating on experience as literary experience—on the form rather than the implications of what he is writing—he is able to write about himself, quite easily and naturally, without directing attention to himself. He will not accomplish that fully again until Till We Have Faces.