C. S. Lewis and Arthur’s friendship

Arthur and C. S. Lewis’s friendship turns an initially improbable meeting into a lasting exchange of imaginative and literary tastes. Their shared response to Norse myth gives them the startling sense of finding someone much like themselves; their differences then become just as important, drawing Lewis toward classic English novels and a new attentiveness to ordinary life.

An unexpected beginning

Arthur had lived near the Lewis family and had earlier tried without success to make friends with Lewis and his brother. Although Arthur and Lewis had attended Campbell together, they had not met there. Their friendship began when Lewis received word that Arthur, convalescing in bed shortly before Lewis’s final term at Wyvern, would welcome a visit. Lewis accepted without being able to recall what prompted him to do so.

Arthur was sitting up in bed when Lewis arrived, and a copy of Myths of the Norsemen lay on the table beside him. The book quickly became the occasion for a discovery neither had anticipated. They found that they liked not only the same subject but the same parts of it, and responded to it in much the same way. Lewis describes this recognition as the discovery that there existed people very like oneself: a wonder made more striking because, until meeting Arthur, he had not imagined such a friendship as something to long for.

Shared tastes and distinct temperaments

Their bond began in an identity of taste, but the two friends were not copies of one another. Lewis recalls Arthur’s home life as nearly the opposite of his own: Arthur came from a large family whose parents belonged to the Plymouth Brethren, yet the household was as quiet as the Lewises’ was noisy. Arthur was the youngest sibling and, at the time of their meeting, was working in the business of one of his brothers. After one or more illnesses, his delicate health led him to leave that work.

Arthur’s interests extended beyond literature. He was a pianist, hoped to compose, and also painted. One early joint scheme was for Arthur to write an operatic score for Loki Bound. The project had a brief, happy existence before being abandoned, but its failure did not diminish the imaginative ease with which the friends conceived it. Arthur’s musical and artistic pursuits formed part of a broader contrast between them: he shared Lewis’s love of myth and marvel while possessing other tastes that Lewis had not yet developed.

Arthur’s literary influence

Lewis says that Arthur influenced him more permanently in literature than Lewis influenced Arthur. Arthur cared little for verse, a difference Lewis tried, with limited success, to change. But Arthur’s own enthusiasm opened a substantial area of reading: he prized what he called the good, solid, old books, meaning the classic English novelists. Before meeting him, Lewis had largely avoided them. A youthful attempt at Thackeray had put Lewis off the author; Dickens was associated in his mind with illustrations he had examined before he could read; and his limited acquaintance with Walter Scott consisted of several weaker medieval novels.

Under Arthur’s influence Lewis read the best of the Waverley novels, the Brontës, and Jane Austen. These works complemented rather than displaced Lewis’s more fantastic reading: the contrast between them increased his pleasure in both. Arthur also changed the terms in which Lewis understood qualities he had previously dismissed as stodgy or ordinary. He called their appeal Homeliness—not merely domesticity, but a rooted connection to simple experience: weather, food, family, and neighborhood.

Learning to notice the ordinary

Arthur’s attention to Homeliness extended beyond novels. Lewis recalls him relishing the opening sentence of Jane Eyre and an opening from a Hans Andersen story, as well as the word beck in the Brontës and scenes set in schoolrooms and kitchens. Such details were not incidental to Arthur’s taste: small, familiar things carried a particular literary pleasure for him, and he taught Lewis to perceive that pleasure rather than overlook it.

The same education reshaped their attention outdoors. Arthur shared and confirmed Lewis’s existing outdoor delights, while directing his eyes away from distant horizons toward what could be seen through a hedge: ordinary rows of cabbages, a quiet farmyard, a gray cat slipping under a barn door, or an old woman returning from the pigsty with an empty bucket. The friends especially valued scenes in which the Homely met the unhomely, as when a small kitchen garden occupied a narrowing patch of fertile ground amid rougher surroundings. Their friendship thus joined shared wonder at myth to a newly cultivated regard for the everyday.

A friendship that redirects reading

Arthur’s influence also intersected with Lewis’s developing literary enthusiasms. During long hours in an empty house, Lewis was immersed in the Romantics and regarded William Morris as his great author of the period. He had encountered Morris first through books on Norse mythology and then through Sigurd the Volsung, which he tried to admire more than he did. Finding The Well at the World’s End in Arthur’s bookcase changed the course of that reading: after looking through it, Lewis went into town the next day to buy his own copy. He went on to read the Morris he could obtain, including Jason, The Earthly Paradise, and the prose romances. Lewis recognized this new delight as partly a revival of an early childhood attraction to knights in armor, and noted that the name WILLIAM MORRIS had acquired a force approaching that of WAGNER.

This episode exemplifies the friendship’s two-way structure without making the friends’ influence identical. Arthur’s strongest lasting contribution, as Lewis presents it, was to disclose the richness of classic English fiction and of ordinary, rooted experience. Their shared appetite for myth and marvel remained the point of recognition from which those other discoveries could grow; difference did not weaken the bond but gave it room to enlarge Lewis’s imaginative life.