Lewis’s imaginative renaissance through Wagner

Lewis’s imaginative renaissance through Wagner was a return of imaginative desire sparked by a chance encounter at Chartres. A periodical headline and an illustration connected the remote world of Norse myth with memories of Joy that he thought he had lost; Wagner’s stories, records, and the mythology he pursued afterward gave that renewed longing a sequence of forms. The change mattered not because it restored the experience at will, but because it made the desire to recover it his overriding aim and altered what he sought from poetry.

The sudden return of desire

The change came early in Lewis’s time at Chartres, against the long winter of diminished experience he describes. He recalls it not as gradual growth but as an instant reversal, using the image of frozen ground transformed at once into a spring landscape. He could identify the moment precisely, though he could not date it: in a schoolroom, his eye happened upon a headline and picture in a literary periodical, perhaps The Bookman or the Times Literary Supplement.

The words were Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods; the picture was an illustration by Arthur Rackham. Lewis had not heard of Wagner or Siegfried, and initially misunderstood the title as a reference to the twilight in which gods lived. Yet the image and words immediately called up a world he identified as Northernness: vast, remote spaces and the twilight of northern summer. He recognized an affinity with Tegner’s Drapa and its association, in his memory, with Balder and cranes flying sunward. The force of the recognition preceded any real knowledge of the opera or its mythology.

That northern world joined the past Joy he remembered from childhood. The distance of the imagined twilight and the distance of his own former experience became one longing, intensified by the realization that the experience had already vanished again as he tried to name it. He understood that recovering it had become his supreme object of desire. The episode therefore brought both return and loss: the old imaginative response was renewed, but it remained beyond his command.

From printed sign to Wagnerian story

The means of pursuing this new interest were already close at hand. Lewis and his brother had a gramophone, and gramophone catalogues were among Lewis’s favorite reading, though he had never connected the records’ unfamiliar opera titles with his own interests. For a week or two, the Rackham image and the records remained separate. Then The Soundbox began publishing weekly synopses of major operas and covered the Ring. Reading those accounts in a state of excitement, Lewis learned who Siegfried was and what the gods’ twilight meant.

He responded by beginning a heroic poem based on Wagner’s version of the Niblung story. Its source was not the operas themselves but the summaries in The Soundbox; at first he had not heard Wagner’s music. The project was unfinished: its fourth book reached only the final scene of The Rheingold, and the poem stopped there. Its incompletion did not make the effort fruitless. Lewis later judged its first three books favorably as a boy’s work, while recognizing that the beginning of the fourth marked a change in his ambitions as a poet.

Learning to suggest rather than state

Before that turn, Lewis had judged his verse largely by whether the lines rhymed, scanned, and carried the story forward. As he tried to convey the excitement the material had awakened, he began searching for expressions that would suggest an experience rather than simply report events. The new ambition exceeded his ability: he lost the clarity of his earlier storytelling, struggled to express the feeling, and fell silent. Yet the failure exposed a new artistic aim. The poem’s breakdown records the point at which making poetry became more than arranging a narrative into verse.

Music followed the printed story. Lewis heard a record of the Ride of the Valkyries in the shop of T. Edens Osborne during the next holidays. He encountered it not as an isolated concert piece but in the imaginative context of heroic drama. Having known little music beyond Sullivan, and already drawn to Northernness, he found the record overwhelming. Wagnerian records, chiefly from the Ring but also from Lohengrin and Parsifal, subsequently became the main claim on his pocket money and the presents he regularly requested. This enthusiasm did not immediately transform his general musical taste; its force lay in the particular world of drama and myth that it opened for him.

A wider mythology and the limits of recurrence

From Wagner, Lewis moved on to books about Norse and related mythology, including Myths of the Norsemen, Myths and Legends of the Teutonic Race, and Mallet’s Northern Antiquities. He became knowledgeable and repeatedly experienced Joy through these readings. At the time, however, he did not notice that the feeling was becoming rarer, or distinguish it clearly from the intellectual satisfaction of learning about the Eddaic universe. He believed that he would have studied Old Norse seriously if he had found a teacher.

The distinction gives the renaissance its particular shape. Knowledge of myth expanded, but acquiring knowledge was not identical to the earlier intensity that had first summoned him. The initial encounter sent Lewis outward through illustration, opera summaries, music, verse, and mythology; none guaranteed that Joy would recur. His account presents imaginative renewal less as possession of a lasting state than as a sequence of encounters that gave longing new objects and, in poetry, a new artistic task.

Other reading in the same period

Lewis’s recollection of reading at Campbell offers a distinct earlier instance of literature’s imaginative power. There he read Matthew Arnold’s Sohrab and Rustum in form under a master known as Octie. The poem’s opening image of fog rising from the Oxus, along with its distant settings and figures, gave him a sense of coolness, calm, and melancholy. He later understood that he had been more captivated by the poem’s distant, attentive vision than by its central tragedy. This memory clarifies that his responsiveness to Northernness did not begin with Wagner: the later encounter revived and redirected an older susceptibility to literary distance and atmosphere.

His reading of Homer at Oxford supplies another contrast. He and his companions first concentrated on the Iliad’s Achillean material, then read the Odyssey in full, until its music and recurring formulas had become part of his memory. Lewis describes his youthful response as romanticized, shaped by William Morris, but says that it later gave way to a more mature enjoyment without erasing the significance of the wanderings or the poem’s decisive moments. These retrospective comparisons show how literary experience could persist while its interpretation changed; Wagner’s special effect was to join that capacity for imaginative reception to the recovered, still-unattainable desire he called Joy.