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sympathy to Madame. I return Stewart’s letter.

      Yours,

      C. S. Lewis

      

       TO RUTH PITTER(BOD):

      Magdalen College,

      Oxford. May 12th 1953

      Dear Miss Pitter

      Or (to speak more accurately)

      Bright Angel!

I’m in a sea of glory! Of course I haven’t had time to read it properly, and there’ll be another, more sober, letter presently. This is just a line to be going on with, and to assure you at once that the new volume is an absolute Corker.¹²² I had feared that you might be one of those who, like poor Wordsworth, leave their talent behind at conversion:¹²³ and now–oh glory–you came up shining out of the font far better than you were before. ‘Man’s despair is like the Arabian sun’¹²⁴-I seriously doubt if there’s any religious lyric between that one and Herbert on the same level. And then my eye strays to the opposite page and gets the ‘dying-dolphin green’.¹²⁵ And ‘What we merit–A silence like a sword’.¹²⁶

      I wonder have you yourself any notion how good some of these are?

      But, as you see, I’m drunk on them at this present. Glory be! Blessings on you! As sweet as sin and as innocent as milk. Thanks forever.

      Yours in great excitement

      C. S. Lewis

      

       TO GEOFFREY BLES (BOD): TS

      Magdalen College

      Oxford 12th May 1953.

      My dear Bles,

      MS duly received: and end leaf returned with thanks. I had seen it, but forgot that end leaves naturally are’nt included in the paper-back proof, and thence foolishly wondered if it had somehow miscarried. Authors with book, like expectant mothers, have their wayward fancies.

      Yours,

      C. S. Lewis

      

      TO RUTH PITTER(BOD):

      Magdalen College,

      Oxford. May 15th 1953

      Dear Miss Pitter

The brightness does not fade: appealing from Lewis drunk to Lewis sober, I still find this an exquisite collection. When I start picking out my favourites, I find I am picking out nearly all. Tree at Dawn is full of delight for eye and ear. Great Winter is extremely new and delightful in rhythm: and ‘storm of suns’¹²⁷ is wonderful. The Other has, I think, a few flaws (the second stanza on p. 15 seems to use words that precious poets have sucked all the juice out of) but also v. great virtues. The noises all through Herding Lambs-not only at ‘rainlike rustle of feet’,¹²⁸ tho’ that is the most striking single aural image–are wonderfully conveyed. Captive Bird is pure gold all through: so lovely fair my ‘sense aches with it’: and I still think as I did about World is Hollow (A v. tough undergraduate to whom I showed it thinks the same as I). Cedar is, I expect, extremely good in imagery, but I’d need a real cedar before me by which to judge. That’s the trouble about very visual writing. On the other hand the colours in Hill & Valley came through really well. Penitence is taut & accurate as a Yeats poem. Narrow but Deep & Aged Man to Y.M.¹²⁹ show you in a v. different vein: not the one I like best, but v. good. May is a fine meaty, yet not heavy, meditation. The Five Dreams do, I don’t know how, build up to a whole greater than the parts. The only one in the book I don’t much like is Father Questioned. I think Rostrevor Hamilton (see The Tell-Tale Article) wd. justly have something to say about the stanza at the top of p. 24.¹³⁰

      I do congratulate you again and again. I hope you are as happy about the poems as you ought to be.

      Yours most sincerely

      C. S. Lewis

      

TO JOHN H. MCCALLUM (P):¹³¹ TS

      218/53.

      Magdalen College, Oxford. 18th May 1953.

      Dear Mr. McCallum,

      I am greatly shocked at your news. My correspondence with Borst was so pleasant and even so intimate that I feel his death as, in some sort, a personal loss. I am sure it will be deeply felt by all of you in many ways. I will try not to give Miss Boxill as much trouble as I gave her predecessor.

      Yours sincerely,

      C. S. Lewis

      

       TO ELSIE SNICKERS (P):

      Magdalen College,

      Oxford May 18th 1953

      Dear Mrs Snickers

      No. I don’t think sin is completely accounted for by faulty reasoning nor that it can be completely cured by re-education. That view has, indeed, been put forward: by Socrates and, in the early 19th Century, by Godwin. But I think it overlooked the (to me) obviously central fact that our will is not necessarily determined by our reason. If it were, then, as you say, what are called ‘sins’ wd. not be sins at all but only mistakes, and would require not repentances but merely correction.

      But surely daily experience shows that it is just not so. A man’s reason sees perfectly clearly that the resulting discomfort and inconvenience will far outweigh the pleasure of the ten minutes in bed. Yet he stays in bed: not at all because his reason is deceived but because desire is stronger than reason. A woman knows that the sharp ‘last word’ in an argument will produce a serious quarrel which was the very thing she had intended to avoid when that argument began and which may permanently destroy her happiness. Yet she says it: not at all because her reason is deceived but because the desire to score a point is at the moment stronger than her reason. People–you and I among them-constantly choose between two courses of action the one which we know to be the worse: because, at the moment, we prefer the gratification of our anger, lust, sloth, greed, vanity, curiosity or cowardice, not only to the known will of God but even to what we know will make for our own real comfort and security. If you don’t recognise this, then I must solemnly assure you that either [you] are an angel, or else are still living in ‘a fool’s paradise’: a world of illusion.

      Of course it is true that many people are so mis-educated or so psychopathic that their freedom of action is v. much curtailed & their responsibility therefore v. small. We cannot remember that too much when we are tempted to judge harshly the acts of other people whose difficulties we don’t know. But we know that some of our own acts have sprung from evil will (proud, resentful, cowardly, envious, lascivious or spiteful will) although we knew better, and that what we need is not-or not only-re-education but repentance, God’s forgiveness, and His Grace to help us to do better next time. Until one has faced this fact one is a child.

      And it is not the function of psychotherapy to make us face this. Its work is the non-moral aspects of conduct. You must not go to the

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