XI

 

Critic and Story-Writer of the Thirties:

Imagination as Servant

 

That a major turning point in Lewis’s intellectual and spiritual life occurred at the time of his conversion in the early 1930s is well known. Lewis affirmed, as is also well known, that an enlarged understanding of the relation of myth to Christianity played a crucial part in his conversion. That affirmation has sometimes been taken as evidence of a complete and abrupt change in attitude toward myth and the imagination and in their relation to reason. The evidence supplied by his works, however, does not support this. To understand Lewis’s works of the 1930s requires recognition that the tension between reason and imagination continues after his conversion and that the place he allows to the imagination is limited at this point by his conception of the “objective.”

A variety of forces came to bear upon the young atheist (or agnostic). His continuing unsatisfied longings, his readings in Christian authors, especially from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, his growing belief in a moral law and therefore in a lawgiver, and his acquaintance and deepening friendships with men who were or were becoming Christians—all drew him to a belief in God. But there is a considerable distance between such Theism and Christianity. Part of the distance—the elimination of alternative possibilities—could be traversed intellectually. He reconstructs the situation in Surprised by Joy:

 

There could be no question of going back to primitive, untheologised and unmoralised, Paganism. The God whom I had [< p. 108] at last acknowledged was one, and was righteous. Paganism had been only the childhood of religion, or only a prophetic dream. Where was the thing full grown? . . . There were really only two answers possible: either in Hinduism or in Christianity. . . . But Hinduism seemed to have two disqualifications. For one thing, it appeared to be not so much a moralised and philosophical maturity of Paganism as a mere oil-and-water coexistence of philosophy side by side with Paganism unpurged . . . . And secondly, there was no such historical claim as in Christianity.¹

 

It was the remaining distance—which required him to deal with such matters as sacrifice and substitution—that caused him difficulty. His rationalism appeared to give him no grounds for handling such nonrational elements of Christianity.

At this point occurred a key episode in Lewis’s life, a long, late-night conversation with J. R. R. Tolkien and “Hugo” Dyson on Saturday, 19 September 1931. The effect of that conversation can hardly be overstated: it was a turning point in Lewis’s journey toward Christianity. He wrote to Arthur Greeves, twelve days later, “I have just passed on from believing in God to definitely believing in Christ—in Christianity.”² But the episode must be examined closely if its effects upon his imaginative and literary life are to be assessed accurately.

In recounting the conversation to Greeves, Lewis begins: “What has been holding me back (at any rate for the last year or so) has not been so much a difficulty in believing as a difficulty in knowing what the doctrine meant .” His problem, then, was not one of accepting the truth or reality of Christianity, but one of relevance: “What I couldn’t see was how the life and death of Someone Else (whoever he was) 2000 years ago could help us here and now.” Lewis had become convinced intellectually of the existence of God and the historicity of the gospel accounts, and the need for help from outside to change the direction of one’s life. But he was not yet able to embrace the “thick” element of Christianity, the mysterious but central parts about “propitiation,” “sacrifice,” and “the blood of the Lamb.” His friends persuaded [< p. 109] him to accept those elements with the imagination and the emotions, if not with the mind:

 

Now what Dyson and Tolkien showed me was this: that if I met the idea of sacrifice in a Pagan story I didn’t mind it at all: again, that if I met the idea of a god sacrificing himself to himself (cf. the quotation opposite the title page of Dymer) I liked it very much and was mysteriously moved by it: again, that the idea of the dying and reviving god (Balder, Adonis, Bacchus) similarly moved me provided I met it anywhere except in the Gospels. The reason was that in Pagan stories I was prepared to feel the myth as profound and suggestive of meanings beyond my grasp even tho’ I could not say in cold prose “what it meant.”

 

Notice that myth is restricted to areas of meaningfulness; it does not convey knowledge of how Christ’s life and death can help one here and now, but enables one to appreciate its power and beauty. What sets Christianity apart from other myths, however, is not its power or meaning, but the factual, historical, “real” elements in it—Lewis seizes on the fact that it is knowable as well as meaningful:

 

Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened: and one must be content to accept it in the same way, remembering that it is God’s myth where the others are men’s myths: i.e. the Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He found there, while Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call “real things.” Therefore it is true, not in the sense of being a “description” of God (that no finite mind could take in) but in the sense of being the way in which God chooses to (or can) appear to our faculties. The “doctrines” we get out of the true myth are of course less true: they are translations into our concepts and ideas of that wh. God has already expressed in a language more adequate, namely the actual incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection. Does this amount to a belief in Christianity? At any rate I am now certain (a) That this Christian story is to be approached, in a sense, as I approach the other myths. (b) That it is the most important and full of meaning.³

 

Christianity embodies the meaningful in the knowable. Reason and the imagination are separate avenues to, on the one hand, knowledge of and, on the other hand, the meaning [< p. 110] of “the actual incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection.” The talk with Tolkien enabled Lewis to recognize the mythical element in Christianity, to accept that element as completing the cognitive; now, comfortable with its meaning, Lewis can put his faith in the God who expressed himself in the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection as well as in creation and the moral law, and become a Christian.

The need expressed in the letter to reconcile myth with “real things” calls attention to an intriguing aspect of Lewis’s thinking, which remains a part of the tension between reason and the imagination for many years. As Lewis, after his conversion, became ever more convinced of the importance of an objective approach to truth and values, he endeavored to convey the utter reality and the unambiguous clarity of the objective by depicting it in concrete imagery or metaphors. Such an approach could have unified imagination and reason in his thinking, as the imagination provides a “picture” which enables the reason to grasp more firmly what the objective is. That unity is not attained at once, however, because of Lewis’s resistance against attention to the self or to a subjective dimension in apprehending the objective, and because of his tendency to treat the concretized objective not as image but as fact, thus received by the reason rather than the imagination. Let it be clear that Lewis never relaxed even slightly his belief in the reality and importance of objectivity; but he did change his way of thinking about the objective and its representations. The physical and mechanical manner of his depiction of the objective in the thirties and forties conveys an absoluteness and rigidity of attitude and interpretation which, in the fifties, he abandons for an approach which softens his attitudes and allows for more subjectivity and flexibility.

The emphasis on concreteness appears first in the twenties, as a part of Lewis’s Idealism, particularly in his attention, in his criticism, to “real things” in literary texts. That was the point of a paper on The Faerie Queene he delivered to a discussion-class at Oxford in the fall of 1922, as Nevill Coghill recalls it: in the paper Lewis gloried not in the [< p. 111] meaning of the allegory but in its details—its dragons, giants, knights, dwarfs, and sorceresses.

 

He rejoiced as much in the ugliness of the giants and in the beauty of the ladies as in their spiritual significances, but most of all in the ambience of the faerie forest and plain that, he said, were carpeted with a grass greener than the common stuff of ordinary glades; this was the reality of grass, only to be apprehended in poetry: the world of the imagination was nearer to the truth than the world of the senses, notwithstanding its palpable fictions. . . . He needed the Greek word Yavoc [brightness, sheen, gladness, joy, pride] to express the radiance of the reality of the greenness of Spenser’s groves and glades, lawns, hills, and forests. It was like the Platonic idea of greenness, a spiritual reality.⁴

 

Notice the lack of emphasis on the literary work as object: that is not Lewis’s kind of objectivism. He was not a part of the New Critical movement which began in America during the 1920s as a reaction against biographical criticism. Lewis, unlike Cleanth Brooks or Allen Tate, did not write close readings of individual texts, analyzing structure, word choice, imagery, figures, and tone to demonstrate the unity of artistry and theme. His interest throughout his career was, rather, in the “real things” seen through the text.

Lewis’s criticism, like that of the New Critics, reacted against biographical criticism. He confronted it directly in a paper on “The Personal Heresy in Poetics,” read to the Martlet Society in 1930 and published in 1933. In it he attacks the assumptions, whether implied or explicit, that “poetry must be the expression of . . . personality” and that “to read poetry means to become acquainted with the poet.”⁵ Lewis’s position is that awareness of the writer behind the poem is not part of the imaginative experience of reading the poem. “The poet” is an abstraction constructed after the fact as one thinks back on the poetic experience; and even the abstraction so constructed is severely limited, drawing upon only those parts of the author involved in making the poem. There can be, Lewis holds, “poetry without a poet” (p. 18)—poetry which grew out of an oral tradition, for example. And all poetry should be read as “poetless poetry” (p. 18). [< p. 112]

My interest here is less in Lewis’s approach as literary theory than in its reflection of his emphasis on “real things” and his disinterest in selves—his own and the “personalities” of others. For part of what bothers Lewis in “personal” criticism is the subjective element it introduces into poetry:

 

The personal theory will hold that the consciousness in question is that of the poet, considered as an individual, contingent, human specimen. Mr. Smith sees things in one way; Mr. Jones sees them in another; Mr. Wordsworth sees them in a third. What we share in reading Wordsworth is just Wordsworth’s point of view as it happens to exist in him as a psychological fact. . . . (p. 15)

 

For Lewis, poetry is important and valuable to the extent that it is universal, not individual and subjective:

 

It is absolutely essential that each word should suggest not what is private and personal to the poet but what is public, common, impersonal, objective. The common world with its nights, its oaks, and its stars, which we have all seen, and which mean at least something the same to all of us, is the bank on which he draws his cheques. (pp. 20-21)

 

One finds those universal qualities by giving attention not to the text itself but to the “real things" seen through the text—seen in a new way, for that is the value of poetry. “I myself, in reading [Herrick’s ‘Upon Julia’s Clothes’], became conscious of silk in a new way. . . . The only experience which has any claim to be poetical experience is an apprehension, not of the poet, but of silk" (pp. l0-ll).

Here, however, a troublesome aspect arises. Lewis is developing an “objective,” “depersonalized” theory of poetry, one in which attention is fixed wholly on the essence of things and away from emotional or contextual attachments personal to the poet: “What is used for the poem is the significance which [things] have for every one; their objective characteristics as real elements in the drama of history” (p. 22). Attention is to be on “the thing itself,” not an individual perception of the thing. But Lewis grants that the poem does not show the thing itself, only an image of it: “It may be true that what I am aware of in reading Herrick’s poem is silk, but it is not silk as an object in rerum natura. [< p. 113] I see it as Herrick saw it” (p. 14). Lewis does not seem fully aware of the implications of that concession: one cannot have the kind of simple “objectivity” Lewis desires as a support for his “objective” view of reality. One cannot escape a subjective element in writing poetry, in reading it, or even in the very perception of “real things.” It is an understanding Lewis begins to take into account in the fifties, and it gives Till We Have Faces depth and resonances his earlier work lacks. At this point, however, he avoids that subjective element by treating images as if they were objects in rerum natura, in spite of his qualification, and by assuming a sort of “readerless poetry” as a corollary to “poetless poetry.”

Lewis’s handling of imagery in poetry is related to the tendency in his early works to image Reality in concrete terms. That tendency appears here also, in his sentence “The first object presented to me is an idea of silk” (p. 10; italics added). Lewis’s attempt to convey the externality of truth brings him dangerously close to Positivism’s claim that only the sensory is real, though Positivism, ironically, seeks to deny the position Lewis was affirming. The same tendency is evident in a review of Taliessin through Logres: he writes that “Byzantium,” in the poem, “is an imaginative net to catch that single, utterly concrete constituent of experience which has no name and which we come to know by using the symbol Byzantium.”⁶ Of course the constituent of experience he refers to is “concrete” only metaphorically; but the “utterly” denies the metaphor. As paradox, it works quite nicely; I suspect, however, that Lewis was not conscious of the paradox, or even of the metaphor itself, so intent was he on conveying the realness of the thing about which Williams wrote. Similarly, in the tenth of his radio talks, Lewis wrote that “the whole mass of Christians are literally the physical organism through which Christ acts.”⁷ He deleted “literally” when the talks were reprinted as Mere Christianity⁸ and later apologized for its use, calling it “a vile journalistic cliche”;⁹ the problem caused by the word is less its hackneyed quality than its reliance on “concreteness” to convey reality. Such images may be an effect of Lewis’s platonism, or his vividly visual imagination, or they may be rhetorical devices. In any case they tend to oversim-[< p. 114]plify the “objective” and to complicate the issue of how such reality is known.

Lewis does not discuss reading explicitly in “The Personal Heresy,” but an objective, quasi-mechanical approach to reading is definitely implied as the standard of “good reading.” The reader is to take in the objects imitated in the poem with as little personal interaction as possible; the metaphor he adopts later, of “receiving” the poem, like a radio set receiving signals, captures his sense well. In this essay he adopted the metaphors of a window and of eyeglasses—they are used for the poet rather than the poem, but the implications are the same for the act of reading:

 

The poet is not a man who asks me to look at him; he is a man who says “look at that” and points; the more I follow the pointing of his finger the less I can possibly see of him. . . . To see things as the poet sees them I must share his consciousness and not attend to it; I must look where he looks and not turn round to face him; I must make of him not a spectacle but a pair of spectacles. (p. 15)

 

Behind such metaphors and such a conception of reading is the tendency to concretize the “objective” and to isolate it from the subjective element which is inevitably part of the acts of reading and perception. A reviewer of The Personal Heresy points out the ultimate inadequacy of Lewis’s approach to reading:  “To suggest, as Mr. Lewis does, that the personality is merely something like a window through which the writer looks upon the world, is to create an unnecessary and insoluble problem by enforcing a cleavage, tolerable only to abstract epistemology, between the subject and the object.”¹⁰ Such a cleavage between subject and object, between “seer” and “perceived,” does not appear in Till We Have Faces—that is crucial to the handling of the key episodes of the work. But it will continue to be reflected in Lewis’s metaphors for two decades more before he finds the conception inadequate.¹¹

Several of Lewis’s early literary essays are technical or textual, helping establish accurate literary texts, but those that are critical reflect the theory introduced in “The Personal Heresy.” They often direct attention to the object pre-[p. 115]sented by the work: love in Donne’s poetry,¹² metals in The Merchant of Venice,¹³ death in Hamlet,¹⁴ and courtly love in the allegorical poetry of the Middle Ages.¹⁵ Where they do not emphasize the object which the poem makes one see, they help one see things—such as the “medievalness” of Troilus and Criseyde, alliterative poetry, fifteenth-century heroic verse, the epic, and Christian theology¹⁶—the way the poet and the poet’s contemporaries saw them. Lewis’s finest achievement as a literary scholar, The Allegory of Love, deals with literature of the Middle Ages, an ideal subject for one who wanted to work “objectively.” Much of the poetry is anonymous; where authorship is known, little biographical information is available, and what is available is not of a kind to encourage speculation about the personality of the writer. Attention, therefore, must be directed toward the work. And the work is so far removed from twentieth-century life that response is quite naturally directed toward the universal images and themes Lewis preferred.

The tension between reason and imagination evident in the early poetry and the emphasis on the concreteness of reality shown in the early criticism are reflected also in Lewis’s first published narrative work, The Pilgrim’s Regress, which appeared in 1933, only two years after the conversation with Tolkien and Dyson. The Pilgrim’s Regress is an allegory embodying an autobiographical account of Lewis’s own religious and intellectual pilgrimage toward his recent experience with Christianity. But it is more than just personal: it is in part a sketch of the cultural and philosophical landscape of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and in particular of those attitudes and movements which Lewis saw as antithetical to Christianity.

The Pilgrim’s Regress is the account of a journey to salvation, and especially of the role of longing, “sweet desire,” Sehnsucht, what Lewis later came to call “Joy” but

here calls Romanticism, in the pursuit of that journey. Sehnsucht supplies the underlying unifying structure for the narrative and is Lewis’s chief interest, as the book’s epigraph indicates: “As cold waters to a thirsty soul, so is good news from a far country."¹⁷ The central character, John, experi-[< p. 116]ences “Sweet Desire” in his youth, and his life thereafter is a quest westward, to locate the island which is his personal image of the object of his desire. Along the way he experiments with a series of substitutes for that real object of desire: lust (brown girls), romantic poetry (Mr. Halfways), and the frivolity of the twenties (the Clevers); each of these objects soon reveals its falsity, but John takes each as further evidence that something real must exist as the true object of his desire, and presses on to find it.

More dangerous to John than the false objects, however, are those philosophies which would explain away his longings and induce him to abandon his quest. In these the allegory presents a brief survey of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century philosophical movements, each summarized pithily and creatively in the words or conduct of a character or group of characters. There is nineteenth-century rationalism (Mr. Enlightenment), which uses scientific explanations to dismiss religion and longing; Freudianism (the Spirit of the Age), which accounts for his longing as wish-fulfillment; cultured worldliness (Mr. Sensible), which tames religion and turns it into a civilizing virtue; counter-romanticism (Mr. Neo-Angular, Mr. Neo-Classical, and Mr. Humanist), which rejects spiritual and emotional experiences generally as “graceful veil[s] of illusion”; and Philosophical Idealism, which covers more of the facts than any system John had yet encountered, but which calls John’s quest and search for a real or personal object of desire only picture-writing or beautiful metaphors which must be appreciated for their beauty, not mistaken for reality.

As John decides to live by Idealism and to accept the Absolute, philosophy turns into religion and a personal god, and he becomes a Theist. History then shows John that there was really a divine element in his romanticism all along--that it, along with moral law and elements of pagan mythology, are means God uses to draw people to himself. John yields up his struggle against Mother Kirk (Christianity), dives into her pool (symbolic of baptism, death of self), and emerges, reborn, to discover that the object of his longings is not really an island but the heavenly home of [< p. 117] his early religious training. He must, therefore, regress—must go back to the East, must live out his Christian life among the people and ideas he had moved through on his way to Christianity, until he reaches the river of physical death, which will finally unite him with that which he desired all along.

The Pilgrim’s Regress resembles Till We Have Faces in a number of ways. Masks are used in both stories, and those in The Pilgrim’s Regress can help illuminate those of Till We Have Faces. Masks in The Pilgrim’s Regress are the symbol of conventional religious attitudes and practices. When John first meets the Steward, symbol of the clergy or church officialdom, they have a good talk about fishing tackle and bicycles. “But just when the talk was at its best, the Steward got up and cleared his throat. He then took down a mask from the wall with a long white beard attached to it and suddenly clapped it on his face, so that his appearance was awful. And he said, ‘Now I am going to talk to you about the Landlord’” (I, i). Later, when John and his family escort his Uncle George toward the river of death, they all put on masks which enable them to handle the situation, except Uncle George: “They wanted to put a mask on Uncle George, but he was trembling so that it would not stay on. So they had to see his face as it was; and his face became so dreadful that everyone looked in a different direction and pretended not to see it” (I, iii).¹⁸ One is reminded of the mask worn by the Priest of Ungit, of his temple girls with “their faces painted till they looked like wooden masks” (p. 42), and of Psyche on her way to the Sacred Mountain, “her eyes, peering out of the heavy, lifeless mask which they had made of her face” (p. 80). The image in both works depicts the proper approach to the gods as impersonal, through the set formulas of organized religion in its least lively and living form, and in both cases that way is shown to be limited and inadequate. Lewis affirms that one must encounter the gods in a personal way, face to face; and one cannot do so while wearing masks of conventionality, deception, or pride.

Thus John in The Pilgrim’s Regress, like Orual in Till We Have Faces, must remove his clothes, emblems of his [< p. 118] defenses and reliance upon himself: “He began, nevertheless, to take off his clothes. They were little loss to him, for they hung in shreds, plastered with blood and with the grime of every shire from Puritania to the canyon: but they were so stuck to him that they came away with pain and a little skin came with them” (IX, iv). Like Orual, he must present his true self, without pretenses or defenses, in order to establish a genuine relation with God. And as in Till We Have Faces a key theme is that acceptance by God requires dying “before you die.” John approaches Mother Kirk with the words, “I have come to give myself up” (IX, iv). He is told he must dive into the water; he must not jump and thus rely on himself, but let go of himself, “abandon all efforts at self-preservation.” In the previous chapter he confronted Death and was told “the cure of death is dying. He who lays down his liberty in that act receives it back” (IX, iii). Now he must act upon what he was told, and in diving, in dying to self, he, like Orual, finds new life.

Also, in both Till We Have Faces and The Pilgrim’s Regress, the central personality in the story is divided between two characters who must be brought together. The rational but especially the emotional aspects of the central personage of The Pilgrim’s Regress are represented by John, while his moral aspect is embodied in the character Vertue: these are the personal equivalents of Sweet Desire and the Rules, of the Pagans and the Shepherds [Israel]. On the personal and the general levels, the two must be unified; so History instructs John: “The truth is that a Shepherd is only half a man, and a Pagan is only half a man, so that neither people was well without the other. . . . And even so, my son, you will not be well until you have overtaken your fellow traveller [Vertue] who slept in my cell last night” (VIII, viii). Thus in both books a central aim is to show the need for combining desire and reason in the religious experience. In Till We Have Faces Orual must unite Psyche’s longings with the clarity of thought and understanding they learned from the Fox. That this was also Lewis’s theme in The Pilgrim’s Regress is indicated by the subtitle: An Allegorical Apology for Christianity Reason and Romanticism. In the Preface he [< p. 119] added later he says that the “lived dialectic [of pursuing Desire beyond its false objects to the true one], and the merely argued dialectic of my philosophical progress, seemed to have converged on one goal; accordingly I tried to put them both into my allegory which thus became a defence of Romanticism (in my peculiar sense) as well as of Reason and Christianity.”¹⁹ That union occurs in Till We Have Faces also.

Differences between the two books are equally striking and in some cases even more important than the similarities. One difference involves seeing. Sight is an important motif in The Pilgrim’s Regress, but its handling is based on Lewis’s emphasis at that point on a nonsubjective approach to reality. As in Till We Have Faces, one character may see something which another character does not: “When [John] sat of an evening with his father and mother, a brown girl, visible only to him, would sidle in and sit at his feet” (I, vi). The girl is visible only to him because she is an illusion, a sexual fantasy which he now must fight against constantly, a barrier to perceiving reality. The same thing is true after John and Vertue reach the extreme West and begin their return journey. “I should warn you of one thing,” their Guide tells them; “the country will look very different on the return journey” (IX, vi). It will look different because their vision of reality previously was blocked by “veils” of illusion like those of Spirits in Bondage and Dymer. Veils are used repeatedly in The Pilgrim’s Regress to distract attention from the subjective, to suggest that perception is a mechanical process, which can be disrupted by “external” means. Thus Humanist talks of throwing a “graceful veil of illusion” over the truths of Mr. Sensible and the giant (VI, iv), and thus the Divine voice says that pagan myth “is the veil under which I have chosen to appear even from the first until now” (IX, v). Lewis, in guarding against a very real danger in subjectivity, puts emphasis on the constancy of the object—objects can be perceived as they really are so long as fantasies or delusions do not hinder one’s sight, as they had hindered John’s and Vertue’s previously. Now, the Guide tells them as they set out, “you are seeing the land [< p. 120] as it really is” (X, i), with the “veils” removed. And as Vertue looks for Mr. Sensible’s house, Slikisteinsauga explains, “It is just as it was when you passed it before, . . . but your eyes are altered. You see nothing now but realities” (X, ii). What they had seen before were illusions, or appearances which deceived them; those now have been stripped away so that they apprehend “the real shape” of things, as Lewis put it in the running headline he added to the 1943 edition to explain the allegory.²⁰ He acknowledges that impediments to sight are possible, but not that a subjective element is inevitably involved.

A second major difference between The Pilgrim’s Regress and Till We Have Faces is that the emphasis in the earlier work is on the acceptance of Christianity by the understanding and the will; myth and imagination are much less important than they will be in Till We Have Faces. The Pilgrim’s Regress is, of course, an apology for Romanticism as well as Reason, but longing appears as that which draws John to the place or person from whom he can learn the truth. Intellectual barriers are removed systematically and first Theism, then Christianity, become convincing and unavoidable. The very form of the work suggests that Lewis’s ultimate faith, at this point, is in the intellect. He writes in allegory, which of all literary forms has the greatest tendency to rely on the intellect for completion of its meaning and effect. In his Preface Lewis does assert that “when allegory is at its best, it approaches myth, which must be grasped with the imagination, not with the intellect.”²¹ But Lewis’s allegory is far from the best; he is unable to embody his material in images and events sufficiently to make it directly apprehendable by the imagination. His real faith is in explanation, in intellect, so he depends on long passages of philosophical discussion to convey the book’s themes. To some extent, of course, the failure to rely sufficiently on images and symbols may be attributed to lack of experience in writing prose fiction. But ability and approach cannot be entirely divorced from inclination. Lewis chose to write allegory, one assumes, partly because he was dealing with allegory regularly as he worked during that time on The [< p. 121] Allegory of Love; but he also chose it because it seemed the best vehicle to do what he wanted to do, to convey what he wanted to say, and we must conclude, then, that the emphasis on intellectual acceptance of the truth was central to that purpose.

That his attitude toward imagination and myth was more limited in The Pilgrim’s Regress than it later became is confirmed by the neglect in The Pilgrim’s Regress of a theme central in Till We Have Faces, the theme of sacrifice. It is not that the theme had not yet assumed importance to Lewis: he made it a central theme of Dymer, before his conversion, and he identified it as a turning point in the conversion itself. Its neglect in The Pilgrim’s Regress is a further evidence that Lewis’s emphasis in this work is on the intellect. Despite all the definitions and clarifications of Romanticism in the added Preface, despite the importance of Sweet Desire in drawing John from his home and to salvation, Lewis’s emphasis in his first effort to communicate publicly about his conversion is on the journey to the acceptance of Theism, a largely intellectual process. The remaining distance, that covered by acknowledgment of the place of sacrifice and substitution, which as he learned from Tolkien and Dyson are best dealt with through myth and received through the imagination, is neglected in The Pilgrim’s Regress—in striking contrast to Till We Have Faces, where just those aspects are emphasized. In The Pilgrim’s Regress, as Kathryn Lindskoog puts it, “Reason is a great heroine”;²² she is by no means a villainness in Till We Have Faces—Psyche herself, who embodies longings and divine insight, acknowledges the importance of the Fox’s approach: “It’d be dark as a dungeon within me but for his teaching” (p. 70). But Reason does not have the strong influence on form, style, and tone in Till We Have Faces that it has in The Pilgrim’s Regress.

A further confirmation of Lewis’s limitations on myth at this point appears in the book’s explicit remarks on myth. As John goes through the caverns of death to self, Wisdom appears to him to say that this adventure is only figurative, only an enactment of the old myths of descent and ascent, [< p. 122] death and rebirth. He is answered by the voice of Mother Kirk, or more likely of Christ himself:

 

“Child, if you will, it is mythology. It is but truth, not fact: an image, not the very real. But then it is My mythology. The words of Wisdom are also myth and metaphor: but since they do not know themselves for what they are, in them the hidden myth is master, where it should be servant: and it is but of man’s inventing. But this is My inventing, this is the veil under which I have chosen to appear even from the first until now. For this end I made your senses and for this end your imagination, that you might see my face and live. What would you have? Have you not heard among the Pagans the story of Semele? Or was there any age in any land when men did not know that corn and wine were the blood and body of a dying and yet living God?” (IX, v)

 

Lewis’s distinction in the second sentence is perplexing, for a decade later, in “Myth Became Fact,” he would write, “What flows into you from the myth is not truth but reality.”²³ Either Lewis was being unusually careless with terminology, or there is a shift in emphasis, a clarification or refinement in his thinking about myth, between the mid-1930s and the mid-1940s. The evidence, considered chronologically, points to the latter. The passage in The Pilgrim’s Regress closely resembles the letter to Greeves, which was written only two years earlier and thus provides a better basis for understanding The Pilgrim’s Regress than does an essay written ten years later. There is, for example, the same distinction between God’s myth and men’s myths, and a striking similarity in wording between “the way in which God chooses to (or can) appear to our faculties” and “the veil under which I have chosen to appear even from the first until now.” Most importantly, however, in the letter to Greeves as in The Pilgrim’s Regress, the emphasis is on the truth of myth. It is not truth as abstract formulations, the way it is used in the later essay, so the two positions are not contradictory. But there is a definite and deliberate assertion that myths are not just falsehoods or errors, perpetrated by pagans; rather, myth contains truth and is one of the means by which God reveals himself to the world. Later, in reflecting back on his schooling, Lewis says that he was [<p. 123] taught the pagan myths were utterly false, “a mere farrago of nonsense.” “No one ever attempted to show in what sense Christianity fulfilled Paganism or Paganism prefigured Christianity.”²⁴ In his writings about myth following his conversion, Lewis seems intent on countering that misconception. As yet there is no attempt to describe myth as a “tasting” of Reality, as there will be in “Myth Became Fact”; first must come the emphasis on the value and acceptability of myth because of its basis in truth.

That this was his intent comes out explicitly in a long footnote on myth in Miracles. It was written, apparently, in 1943 or 1944, about the same time as “Myth Became Fact,” though it retains the emphases of The Pilgrim’s Regress. Lewis specifies that myth cannot be dismissed in the terms his schoolmasters had used: “Myth in general is not merely misunderstood history . . . nor diabolical illusion . . . nor priestly lying.” Rather, myth is “a real though unfocussed gleam of divine truth falling on human imagination.” It is one of the means God used to reveal himself: the mythology of the Hebrews was “the mythology chosen by God to be the vehicle of the earliest sacred truths.”²⁵ Less than a year later, Lewis writes that myth is related to reality, not truth; but there he has moved on to deal with a different threat, that of abstraction, and “truth” is used in a different sense from that in the letter to Greeves, The Pilgrim’s Regress, Miracles, and “Is Theology Poetry?”²⁶ The point is that he has moved on—there is a definite shift of attention, a growth of conception, from the earlier emphasis on myth as revealing truth, to the later emphasis on myth as affording a “taste” of reality.

Lewis’s linking of truth with myth derives directly from his manner of imaging the “objective.” Myth, in the terms of The Pilgrim’s Regress, is neither “fact” (the scientific or historical—dealt with by reason) nor “the very real” (the concrete—apprehended by the senses); it is, rather, “truth” or “an image”—to be grasped with the imagination. The distinctions, the relationships, the implied lower status of myth, since it is “but truth” and only “an image,” are difficult to reconcile with Lewis’s later ideas. But Lewis is driven to all this by “concreteness”  “Reality” is superior to [< p. 124] “meaning” and “image” because reality exists, whether it has meaning for anyone or not, whereas an image is but a reflection of the “real”; and reason ranks above imagination because the former deals with “real things,” the latter only with images. Myth, therefore, remains limited: it is a veil, something one must ultimately get past if one is to experience reality.

The conclusion of the passage in The Pilgrim’s Regress also is similar to the letter to Greeves: for salvation one needs both “real things” (“the actual incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection”) and myth (which shows the significance of those things). And both are emphasized by the Divine voice’s words: “For this end I made your senses [to see and taste real corn and wine] and for this end your imagination [to bring out their significance, that they are the blood and body of a dying and yet living God].” All this, “that you might see my face and live”: that you might accept the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection as the complete revelation of God and be saved. The final phrase contains a biblical allusion, to Exodus 33, where Moses was talking to God on Mount Sinai: “Moses said, ‘I pray thee, show me thy glory. . . .’ [The Lord] said, ‘you cannot see my face; for man shall not see me and live’” (vv. 18, 20). Lewis’s alteration of the biblical phrase seems to reflect the difference between the Old Testament situation and that which follows the incarnation. Before the incarnation God appeared behind the veil of myth, as he hid his full glory from Moses: “And the Lord said, . . . ‘I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by; then I will take away my hand, and you shall see my back; but my face shall not be seen’ ” (33:21-23). Lewis’s “see my face” suggests the fuller knowledge of God available, through myth and fact, after the incarnation. There are close similarities between “that you might see my face and live” and “how can they meet us face to face till we have faces”: the imagery is the same, both draw upon the tradition of the danger confronting a mortal who comes into the presence of a god, and both allude to the same chapter in Exodus.²⁷ The similarities demonstrate the continuity of central elements of the Till We Have Faces myth throughout Lewis’s life. But the differences are equally [< p. 125] important. The emphasis in the earlier passage, in its allegorical form as well as in the ideas expressed, is on understanding, on the “seeing,” in keeping with Lewis’s sense of myth at the time. The emphasis in the later one, however, is on the experience, the “meeting,” the “tasting” of Reality central to the broader and more adequate conception of myth he developed later.

The conversation with Tolkien and Dyson, important as it was to Lewis’s conversion, did not resolve the tension between reason and imagination. Lewis continued, after his conversion as before it, to appreciate the imagination greatly, but to put his final trust in reason. Thus, although Lewis enjoyed reading fantasies, plunging into imaginative worlds wholly different from and separate from our world, he held back, in his own stories, from the commitment to the imagination required for pure fantasy. So it was in The Pilgrim’s Regress; so it is also in the first book of his “space trilogy,” Out of the Silent Planet. It enables one to visit, imaginatively, the strange region of Malacandra, “in search of such beauty, awe, or terror as the actual world does not supply,” which made stories of fantasy or science fiction appealing to Lewis.²⁸ In this case a character with the moral and social presuppositions of our world encounters a world with different assumptions and values, a world which is truly a community, where beings very different from each other are able to cooperate and live in harmony. The narrative, however, is not left to convey those themes on its own. The conceptual truths which underlie the story are spelled out in statement form, in the account of the war in heaven at the time of Satan’s rebellion29 and in the extended conversation between the Oyarsa and Weston, with Ransom as interpreter.30 Lewis’s perhaps unconscious penchant for and ultimate reliance upon the conceptual comes through as he comments on the story to a correspondent: “Any amount of theology can now be smuggled into people’s minds under cover of romance without their knowing it.”31 The emphasis on the imaginative as useful to the conceptual stands in striking contrast to the method of Tolkien, and to Lewis’s own later method in Till We Have Faces.  [<p. 126]

Tolkien, in his important essay “On Fairy-Stories,” glories in the imagination’s “freedom from the domination of observed ‘fact.’ ” The quality Tolkien called Fantasy, or the imaginative in its fullest sense, creates

 

images of things that are not only “not actually present,” but which are indeed not to be found in our primary world at all, or are generally believed not to be found there. . . . That the images are of things not in the primary world (if that indeed is possible) is a virtue not a vice. Fantasy (in this sense) is, I think, not a lower but a higher form of Art, indeed the most nearly perfect form, and so (when achieved) the most potent.32

 

Tolkien stresses that separateness because he believed that the farther stories are removed from our world, the better they can convey “a sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth.”33 Thus Tolkien carefully distanced his stories from the worlds of everyday reality and wrote pure fantasy, never allegory. Lewis avoids such a total removal from our world, because of his attachment to “everyday reality or truth,” embodied for him in the “objective.” Tolkien also held an objective view of truth, but he did not need to embody the objective in something from the knowable world to give it stability, as Lewis seems to in his early stories: thus Lewis turns to allegory, with its overt pointers to our world; or uses human characters and earthly departure points to ground his story in the “knowable” world; or includes expository passages to assure that intended significance not be lost.

Valuable as Lewis regarded myth, and great as was the appeal of imagination to him, he was unable to give himself to it fully. His early grounding in rationalism and his need for the stability of the “object” create a tension in him between reason and the imagination, and a constraint upon the imaginative, not in theory but in practice. That he will use the rational without the mythical but not the mythical without the rational shows, if not a preference for the latter, at least a greater trust in it, which will increase in the apologetic works of the 1940s before it is reversed in Till We Have Faces in the 1950s.  [< p. 127]