Reading, a week or
two ago, Mr C. S. Lewiss
recently-published book, Beyond Personality (it is a series of reprinted broadcasts
on theology), I learned from the blurb on the dust jacket that a critic who should, and
indeed does, know better had likened an earlier book, The Screwtape Letters, to
The Pilgrims Progress. I do not hesitate to compare Mr Lewiss
achievement with Pilgrims Progress were his quoted words. Here is a
sample, entirely representative, from the later book:
Well, even on the human level, you know, there are two kinds of
pretending. Theres a bad kind, where the pretence is instead of the real
thing, as when a man pretends hes going to help you instead of really helping you.
But theres also a good kind, where the pretence leads up to the real thing.
When youre not feeling particularly friendly but know you ought to be, the best
thing you can do, very often, is to put on a friendly manner and behave as if you were a
much nicer chap than you actually are. And in a few minutes, as weve all
noticed. you will be really feeling friendlier than you were. Very often the only
way to get a quality is to start behaving as if you had it already. Thats why
childrens games are so important. Theyre always pretending to be grown-ups
playing soldiers, playing shop. But all the time they are hardening their muscles
and sharpening their wits, so that the pretence of being grown-ups helps them in earnest.
The book is like this all the way through, and I think most of us would hesitate a long
time before equating Mr Lewis with Bunyan.
One must make some allowance for the fact that these essays are reprinted broadcasts, but
even on the air it is not really necessary to insult your hearers with homey little asides
like you know and mind you, or Edwardian slang like
awfully, jolly well, specially for
especially. awful cheek and so forth. The idea, of course, is to
persuade the suspicious reader, or listener, that one can be a Christian and a jolly
good chap at the same time. I dont imagine that the attempt would have much
success, and in any case the cotton wool with which the B.B.C. stuffs its speakers
mouths makes any real discussion of theological problems impossible, even from an orthodox
angle. But Mr Lewiss vogue at this moment, the time allowed to him on the air and
the exaggerated praise he has received, are bad symptoms and worth noticing.
Students of popular religious apologetics will notice early in
the book a side-kick at all these people who turn up every few years with some
patent simplified religion of their own, and various hints that unbelief is
out of date, old-fashioned and so forth. And they will remember Ronald Knox saying much the
same thing fifteen years ago, and R. H. Benson twenty or thirty years before that, and
they will know in which pigeon-hole Mr Lewis should be placed.
A kind of book that has been endemic in England for quite sixty years
is the silly-clever religious book, which goes on the principle not of threatening the
unbeliever with Hell, but of showing him up as an illogical ass, incapable of clear
thought and unaware that everything he says has been said and refuted before. This school
of literature started, I think, with W. H. Mallocks New Republic, which must
have been written about 1880, and it has had a long line of practitioners R. H.
Benson, Chesterton,
Father Knox, Beachcomber and others, most of them Catholics, but some, like Dr
Cyril Alington and (I suspect) Mr Lewis himself, Anglicans. The line of
attack is always the same. Every heresy has been uttered before (with the implication that
it has also been refuted before); and theology is only understood by theologians
(with the implication that you should leave your thinking to the priests). Along these
lines one can, of course, have a lot of clean fun by correcting loose thinking
and pointing out that so-and-so is only saying what Pelagius said in AD 400 (or
whenever it was), and has in any case used the word transubstantiation in the wrong sense.
The special targets of these people have been T. H. Huxley, H. G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, Professor
Joad, and others who are associated in the popular mind with Science and Rationalism. They have never
had much difficulty in demolishing them though I notice that most of the demolished
ones are still there, while some of the Christian apologists themselves begin to look
rather faded.
One reason for the extravagant boosting that these people always
get in the press is that their political affiliations are invariably reactionary. Some of
them were frank admirers of Fascism
as long as it was safe to be so. That is why I draw attention to Mr C. S. Lewis and his
chummy little wireless talks, of which no doubt there will be more. They are not
really so unpolitical as they are meant to look. Indeed they are an out-flanking movement
in the big counter-attack against the Left which Lord Elton. A. P. Herbert. G. M. Young, Alfred Noyes and various
others have been conducting for two years past.
I notice that in his new book, Adam and Eve, Mr Middleton Murry instances
the agitation against Mosleys
release from internment as a sign of the growth of totalitarianism, or the
totalitarian habit of mind, in this country. The common people, he says, still detest
totalitarianism: but he adds in a later footnote that the Mosley business has shaken this
opinion somewhat. I wonder whether he is right. On the face of it, the demonstrations
against Mosleys release were a very bad sign. In effect people were agitating
against Habeas Corpus. In
1940 it was a perfectly proper action to intern Mosley, and in my opinion it would have
been quite proper to shoot him if the Germans had set foot in Britain. When it is a
question of national existence, no government can stand on the letter of the law:
otherwise a potential quisling has only to avoid committing any indictable offence, and he
can remain at liberty, ready to go over to the enemy and act as their gauleiter as soon as
they arrive. But by 1943 the situation was totally different. The chance of a serious
German invasion had passed, and Mosley (though possibly he may make a come-back at some
future date I wont prophesy about that) was merely a ridiculous failed
politician with varicose veins. To continue imprisoning him without trial was an
infringement of every principle we are supposedly fighting for.
But there was also strong popular feeling against Mosleys
release, and not, I think, for reasons so sinister as Mr Murry implies. The comment one
most frequently heard was Theyve only done it because hes a rich
man, which was a simplified way of saying Class privilege is on the up-grade
again. It is a commonplace that the political advance we seemed to make in 1940 has
been gradually filched away from us again. But though the ordinary man sees this
happening, he is curiously unable to combat it: there seems to be nowhere to take hold. In
a way, politics has stopped. There has been no General Election, the elector is conscious
of being unable to influence his M.P., Parliament has no control over the Government. You
may not like the way things are going, but what exactly can you do about it? There is no
concrete act against which you can plausibly protest.
But now and again something happens which is obviously
symptomatic of the general trend something round which existing discontents can
crystallize. Lock up Mosley was a good rallying cry. Mosley, in fact, was a
symbol, as Beveridge
still is and as Cripps
was in 1942. I dont believe Mr Murry need bother about the implications of this
incident. In spite of all that has happened, the failure of any genuinely totalitarian
outlook to gain ground among the ordinary people of this countr