C. S. Lewis and Smewgy

Smewgy is C. S. Lewis’s form master at Wyvern and one of the school’s two unambiguous blessings. Their relationship is formative because Smewgy teaches not only Latin, Greek, and the attentive reading of poetry, but also a model of courtesy and mutual respect that briefly cuts across Wyvern’s hierarchy. Under his guidance, Lewis comes to experience classical texts not merely as work mastered, but as poetry to be savored and understood precisely.

Identity and first impression

Lewis spells the teacher’s name Smewgy to guide its pronunciation: the first syllable should rhyme with “Fugue,” though the Wyvernian spelling was “Smugy.” The name’s sound matters because Smewgy’s distinctive voice becomes central to Lewis’s account of him. Smewgy is gray-haired, wears large spectacles, and has a wide mouth that gives him a froglike expression; his voice, by contrast, is musical rather than honeyed.

Lewis says he had been fortunate in teachers except at Oldie’s, but Smewgy exceeded even his high expectations. The praise is grounded in particular features of his teaching and conduct, rather than in easy indulgence: Smewgy can be severe, yet his severity is measured and free of taunting. Lewis presents the combination of intellectual command and personal courtesy as what makes him exceptional.

A form made into a community

Smewgy teaches a form made up of contrasting groups: younger New Bugs, including scholarship boys like Lewis, and older veterans who have reached the form later in their progress through the school. Smewgy’s manners help make this mixed group feel like a unity. He addresses the boys as “gentlemen,” setting an expectation of conduct that makes the distinction between fags and Bloods recede within his classroom.

His courtesy appears in small, concrete gestures. On a hot day, after giving the boys permission to remove their coats, he asks their permission before taking off his own gown. The gesture does not erase Wyvern’s wider system, but it establishes a different standard for relations inside the form: consideration and respect apply in both directions, including between teacher and pupils.

That standard is especially clear after Lewis is sent to the Headmaster over bad work. The Headmaster mistakes Smewgy’s report for a complaint about Lewis’s manners and threatens and rates him accordingly. When Smewgy learns what was actually said, he immediately draws Lewis aside and corrects the misunderstanding. He explains that Lewis will have to be whipped if his Greek Grammar does not improve the next week, but that this has nothing to do with Lewis’s manners or Smewgy’s. Academic punishment, in his view, does not alter the proper tone between one gentleman and another. Lewis remembers the episode as a demonstration of decorum without familiarity, hostility, or forced humor.

Smewgy’s maxim against living with “amousia,” the absence of the Muses, gives this conduct an aesthetic as well as a social dimension. Lewis connects courtesy with the Muses and with Spenser’s understanding of its place in a humane life. In the competitive and ostentatious environment of school, Smewgy thus represents a cooler, more gracious possibility: his presence ennobles the boys even apart from the lessons he formally teaches.

Poetry, scholarship, and Lewis’s changing reading

Smewgy reads each verse aloud so that it becomes music, in a style between speech and song. Lewis describes this as especially effective for enchanting boys, while recognizing that more dramatic and less rhythmical ways of reading can be learned later. The method teaches him what he calls the right sensuality of poetry: words are to be savored and mouthed in solitude, not only decoded for their meaning.

Smewgy’s response to Milton makes that receptiveness visible. Of the line “Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues, Powers,” he says, “That line made me happy for a week.” Lewis had not previously heard anyone speak in this way about poetry. Smewgy’s delight gives literary response a personal seriousness, showing that a verse can remain a source of happiness beyond the moment of reading it.

The same teacher who enchants can also analyze. Smewgy makes an idiom or textual crux clear, and Lewis comes to understand that scholarly accuracy is not mere pedantry or an arbitrary discipline. Precision is a form of delicacy; missing a poem’s syntax may mean missing an aesthetic feature as well. This insight joins close reading to pleasure: the poem’s music and its grammatical construction are not competing concerns, but aspects of a work that attentive reading can disclose together.

The classical curriculum gives this training its particular shape. Boys on the classical side officially did little besides classics, a concentration Lewis later considers educationally wise. Smewgy teaches Latin and Greek, while other subjects enter only incidentally. Under his instruction Lewis especially enjoys Horace’s Odes, Book IV of the Aeneid, and Euripides’ Bacchae. He had already taken pleasure in mastering classical work as a craft; with Smewgy, he begins to taste the classics as poetry.

Classical imagination and the Northernness

Euripides’ portrayal of Dionysus becomes linked in Lewis’s mind with the mood of Mr. Stephens’ Crock of Gold, which he had recently read with great excitement. The association introduces an imaginative quality distinct from Northernness. Pan and Dionysus do not possess the cold, piercing appeal Lewis associates with Odin and Frey; instead, the classical material brings a Mediterranean and volcanic quality, an orgiastic rhythm that is not strongly erotic.

Lewis suggests that this new imaginative register may have been connected, perhaps unconsciously, with his increasing dislike of public-school orthodoxies and conventions and his desire to break with them. The evidence does not make Smewgy the cause of that rebellion: rather, his teaching places Greek poetry within a wider change in Lewis’s imaginative life, even as his own decorum offers a humane contrast to the school’s conventions. Their relationship therefore holds two developments together: Lewis’s appetite for forms of poetry beyond Northernness, and his discovery, in one teacher’s classroom, of scholarship joined to courtesy.