Mr Lewis's Papers

Press, Volume CI, Issue 29832, 26 May 1962, Page 3

Mr Lewis's Papers

They Asked For A Paper. By C. S. Lewis. Bles. 211 pp. Admirers of Mr Lewis will be sure to read his latest book, but others may hesitate. There is an art in choosing or composing titles, and for once Mr Lewis's inspiration, some may think, has forsaken him. The title “They Asked For A Paper” is not particularly inviting. It seems to carry the unpleasant implication: “On your own head be it!” or “You asked for it!” However, those who are so easily put off will miss something really worth-while. Mr Lewis is noted for the quality of style which throws his opinions and arguments into sharp relief, and this quality becomes even more marked when he uses the spoken word. No-one, for instance, after reading in the present volume, can have the slightest doubt about Mr Lewis's response to Kipling as a writer of stories about India. “The pleasure of confederacy is the cardinal fact about the Kipling world. . . . His comic stories are nearly all about hoaxes: an outsider mystified is his favourite joke. His jungle is not free from it. His very railway engines are either recruits or Mulvaneys dressed up in boilers. His polo-ponies are public school ponies. Even his saints and angels are in a celestial civil service. It is this übiquitous presence of the Ring, this unwearied knowingness, that renders his work in the long run suffocating and unendurable.” The book is full of quotable sentences mostly with a cutting edge. For example, speaking of a small critic of a great book, he remarks, “It is like reading a review by a jackal on a book written by a lion.” In a speech called “The Inner Ring,” he mentions the World, the Flesh and the Devil. “The Devil I shall leave strictly alone. The association between him and me in the public mind has already gone quite as deep as I wish: in some quarters it has already reached the level of confusion if not of identification." On the other hand many things are said in “They Asked For A Paper” which convey quite a different tone. His toast “proposed to the Edinburgh Sir Walter Scott Club” might be described as superb. Edwin Muir's essay on Sir Walter Scott is perhaps comparable: but it is many years since anything so justly perceptive has been spoken concerning the author of the Waverly Novels.

Equally good and not strikingly different in manner is “Hamlet: the Prince or the Poem.” which was “The Annual Shakespeare Lecture of the British Academy, 1942.” Another paper which gives Mr Lewis ample scope is “The Literary Impact of the Authorised Version." Here he has something new to say on every page—no mean feat. Towards the end of the book Mr Lewis speaks as theologian and preacher. His paper, “On Obstinacy In Belief,” delivered to the Oxford. Socratic Society, is both instructive and amusing; but the sermon, “The Weight of Glory,” is on another plane altogether. Mr Lewis would have been an eloquent and learn ad divine.