C.S. Lewis's ‘Great War’ with Owen Barfield by Lionel Adey (review)

418 LETTERS IN CANADA 1978 from Schopenhauer as easily as he may be associated with him. Moreover, Chamberlin does not offer readings of such works by Wilde as 'The Soul of Man under Socialism,' 'The Happy Prince,' the plays, or The Picture of Dorian Gray. The readings of Salome and the letters from prison in chapter5 do not provide an adequate basis for a general interpretation. One also wonders about the total soundness of Chamberlin's treatment of will. For instance, he characterizes as a 'romantic infatuation with obsessive self-consciousness' (p 145) Pater's famous reference to 'each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world.' But, in context, Pater is referring to the impact of modern psychology on the possibilities of freedom, possibilities that Pater and Wilde both see as paradoxically diminished by scientific and technological progress. Similarly, Chamberlin says little about the late Victorian plutocracy, both symptom and cause of decline as portrayed in novels by Wilde's contemporaries , Anthony Trollope and Henry James. Wilde had an ambivalent relation with this milieu: he exploited it in publicizing himself in the 1880s, but he satirized it in a variety of writings, sometimes scathingly. By playing down these aspects of Wilde Chamberlin undercuts the importance of aestheticism and decadence as a critique of Victorian 'improvement.' Moreover, though he sees Wilde as concerned with general liberation, by the final chapter issues of autonomy move from politics and society into art. In Coleridge, however, imaginative activity is seen as 'co-existing with the conscious will' so that his statement on imagination, in Michael Cooke's words, 'directs itself toward the enterprise of being alive and human and of negotiating at once the conditions and contingencies of being ... Taken in this light, the imagination is suffused with a quality of choice, and bears principal responsibility for the shape life (as well as art) takes' (The Romantic Will [1976], p 17). Writers like Pater and Wilde insist on the aesthetic character of social life. Rousseau in The Confessions, Book 1, suggests that feeling can be shaped by human fictions prior to moral education: hence the implicit importance of seeing how men 'make up' their institutions and persons. For Wilde such an awareness led to bisexuality and to a socialism consonant with many of Mill's reflections in On Liberty as well as with those of the young Marx. (RICHARD DELLAMORA) Lionel Adey. C.S . Lewis's 'Great War' with Owen Barfield English Literary Studies, University of Victoria. 136. $3.75 Despite their close friendship C.S. Lewis and Owen Barfield held profoundly divergent metaphysical, ethical, and literary views, and in this account of their 'Great War' letters of 1925-7 Lionel Adey attempts to explain the main points on which they differed. This exchange of letters, HUMANITIES 419 early in their careers, arose first from Lewis's attempt to dissuade Barfield from a belief in anthroposophy, and secondly from Lewis's disagreement with Barfield's contention, in Poetic Diction (1925), that poetry conveys knowledge and that the imagination provides truth. The letters and essays in manuscript that Adey examines involve attack and counterattack on these issues. This monograph is obviously intended for the specialist, but even so it is difficult to resist a nagging doubt about the value of reporting on this debate - certainly in such detail. One of the main reasons Adey gives for writing about this exchange is that it is, he claims, 'indispensable' for tracing the development of Lewis's values. Yet as he makes perfectly clear Lewis's thinking is 'immature' at this point and, in any case, changes considerably after his conversion to Anglicanism in 1931; there is little here that is necessary for understanding Lewis's later thought. Moreover, one of the documents (entitled the Summa) that is central to Adey's argument he describes as 'the most difficult and curious piece of prose Lewis ever wrote. Its close-knit ratiocination makes it virtually incomprehensible as a whole.' This does not encourage the reader to want to know any more about the Summa, particularly as Adey points out that Lewis quickly moved beyond the position set out there. Adey's detailed recounting of...