DEDICATION
To CHARLES WILLIAMS
DEAR WILLIAMS,
When I remember what kindness I received and what pleasure I had in
delivering these lectures in the strange and beautiful hillside College at Bangor, I feel
almost ungrateful to my Welsh hosts in offering this book not to them, but to you. Yet
I cannot do otherwise. To think of my own lecture is to think of those other lectures
at Oxford in which you partly anticipated, partly confirmed, and most of all clarified
and matured, what I had long been thinking about Milton. The scene was, in a way,
medieval, and may prove to have been historic. You were a vagus thrown among us
by the chance of war. The appropriate beauties of the Divinity School provided your
background. There we elders heard (among other things) what we had long
despaired of hearing—a lecture on Comus which placed its importance where the
poet placed it—and watched “the yonge fresshe folkes, he or she,” who filled the
benches listening first with incredulity, then with toleration, and finally with delight, to
something so strange and new in their experience as the praise of chastity.
Reviewers, who have not had time to re-read Milton, have failed for the most part to
digest your criticism of him; but it is a reasonable hope that of those who heard you
in Oxford many will understand henceforward that when the old poets made some
virtue their theme they were not teaching but adoring, and that what we take for the
didactic is often the enchanted. It gives me a sense of security to remember that, far
from loving your work because you are my friend, I first sought your friendship
because I loved your books. But for that, I should find it difficult to believe that your
short Preface
[1]
to Milton is what it seems to me to be—the recovery of a true
critical tradition after more than a hundred years of laborious misunderstanding. The
ease with which the thing was done would have seemed inconsistent with the weight
that had to be lifted. As things are, I feel entitled to trust my own eyes. Apparently,
the door of the prison was really unlocked all the time; but it was only you who
thought of trying the handle. Now we can all come out.
Yours,
C. S. LEWIS
[1] The Poetical Works of Milton. The World’s Classics, 1940.
