Arthur

Arthur was C. S. Lewis’s first close friend, a near-double in imaginative taste whose differences also enlarged Lewis’s world. Their friendship began with an almost startling recognition in a book of Norse myths, then became a lasting exchange: Arthur shared Lewis’s love of myth and marvel while bringing him toward classic novels and the pleasures of the ordinary.

Identity and first meeting

Arthur lived near Lewis’s family and was the exact contemporary of Lewis’s brother. He and Lewis had both attended Campbell College, though they had never met there. The earlier attempt Arthur had made to befriend the brothers had failed; their actual friendship began shortly before the start of Lewis’s final term at Wyvern, when Lewis received word that Arthur was convalescing in bed and would welcome a visit.

Lewis found Arthur sitting up in bed, with a copy of Myths of the Norsemen on the table beside him. Each asked the other whether he liked the book. The questions quickly gave way to a shared examination of its pages: they pointed, quoted, talked, and soon nearly shouted, discovering that they liked not only the same work but the same parts of it, and in the same way. Both knew what Lewis called the stab of Joy, and for both its arrow came from the North. The book did not merely supply a common interest; it disclosed to Lewis that another person could be very like himself in a way he had never expected.

A friendship of likeness and difference

The affinity between the boys did not erase their differences. Lewis describes Arthur’s home as nearly the opposite of his own: Arthur’s parents belonged to the Plymouth Brethren, and he was the youngest of a large family, yet the household was almost as quiet as Lewis’s was noisy. Arthur was working in one of his brothers’ businesses, but delicate health and repeated illness eventually took him out of that work.

Arthur had several artistic ambitions and abilities. He was a pianist, hoped to compose, and also painted. One of the boys’ early plans was for Arthur to write an operatic score for Loki Bound. The project had a brief, happy life before dying without consequence; its failure did not diminish the creative companionship it represented. Lewis says that Arthur influenced him more, and more permanently, in literature than Lewis influenced Arthur. Arthur’s principal limitation as a literary companion was his slight interest in verse.

Classic books and Homeliness

Arthur’s most enduring literary gift to Lewis was an appetite for what he called the good, solid, old books: the classic English novelists. Before meeting Arthur, Lewis had largely avoided them. He had attempted Thackeray’s The Newcomes when too young, and did not return to Thackeray until Oxford; Dickens had repelled him because of the illustrations he had studied before learning to read. Of Walter Scott, he knew only a few of the weaker medieval novels.

Under Arthur’s influence, Lewis read the best of the Waverley novels, the Brontës, and Jane Austen. These works complemented his more fantastic reading: each kind became more enjoyable through its contrast with the other. Arthur also altered the terms in which Lewis understood what had once seemed stodgy or ordinary. He called those qualities Homeliness—not merely domesticity, but a rooted attachment to simple experience: weather, food, family, and neighborhood.

Arthur could take sustained delight in the opening sentence of Jane Eyre and in the line “How it did rain, to be sure.” The word “beck” in the Brontës pleased him, as did schoolroom and kitchen scenes. His attention to the homely was not confined to books. He looked for it outdoors as well, teaching Lewis to notice a register of landscape that Lewis’s earlier, narrowly romantic habits had passed over.

Influence and significance

Before Arthur, Lewis had been drawn chiefly to what seemed awe-inspiring, wild, eerie, or distant. Mountains and clouds were particular favorites; the sky remained a central element in his sense of landscape, and he carefully distinguished cloud forms and their heights. The country of his childhood had encouraged this romantic bent, including the Green Hills glimpsed from the nursery window. Arthur’s influence did not displace that attraction to the remote. It gave Lewis another way of seeing: the familiar and rooted could possess imaginative force of its own.

Arthur therefore mattered both as the first person Lewis recognized as deeply like himself and as a friend whose different tastes made that likeness fruitful. Their shared Northernness confirmed Lewis’s existing imaginative experience; Arthur’s enthusiasm for classic fiction and ordinary settings broadened it. The friendship’s significance lies in that combination of recognition and education: Lewis found a companion in the mythic North and, through him, learned to attend more fully to the homely world close at hand.