Classic period

The Classic period is the name given to C. S. Lewis’s boyhood phase in which school, reading, and imaginative enthusiasms shaped both his tastes and his sense of the world. Its significance lies less in a single continuous adventure than in the sequence of encounters it preserves: an unhappy school experience set against his brother’s, poems and music opening distant imaginative landscapes, and early religious doubts taking form within the habits of classical education.

School and Family

When C. S. Lewis entered Wyvern, his brother had already formed a very different attachment to the school. The brother had liked Wyvern and looked forward to sharing it with his younger sibling, as the two had shared an understanding of Boxen. Lewis’s brother had gone to Wyvern directly from Oldie’s; Lewis arrived after a preparatory school where he had been happy. The difference mattered: even the freedom to eat as much or as little as he wanted at table, which had seemed astonishing to his brother after Oldie’s, held little appeal for Lewis, who had learned at Belsen to regard decent food as ordinary.

Lewis’s response to Wyvern therefore became a family disappointment. He loathed a school his brother loved, and his attacks on the brother’s ideals collided with Wyvern’s judgment that he might become a Coll Punt. The long-standing bond between the boys was strained, nearly broken, by their incompatible experiences. Their father had sent them there to become public-school boys, but the result appalled him: the family’s hopes for the school’s influence turned into a comic and painful conflict over what that influence had produced. His father’s deliberate mispronunciation of the school’s name, and his complaint of “Wyvernian affectation,” registered his displeasure as the brothers’ styles diverged.

Books and Imaginative Education

At Campbell College, reading Matthew Arnold’s Sohrab and Rustum in form became one of the most important experiences of Lewis’s school life. He loved the poem immediately and retained that attachment. What first held him was not its central tragedy, which he understood only later, but a series of images and places: the artist in Pekin, the cypress in the queen’s garden, Rustum’s remembered youth, the pedlars from Khabul, and the waste of Chorasmia. Arnold’s poem taught him to value a passionate but quiet gaze directed toward things at a distance.

The encounter with Wagner began before Lewis heard the music. The printed shape of Wagner’s name had already become a magical symbol to him. During a holiday, in the dark and crowded shop of T. Edens Osborne, he heard a recording of the Ride of the Valkyries for the first time. Rather than treating it as a concert piece, he received it through his existing enthusiasm for heroic drama and Northernness. Afterward, Wagnerian records—especially selections from the Ring, but also from Lohengrin and Parsifal—became the chief use of his pocket money and the presents he repeatedly requested. The music intensified an imaginative interest already prepared by books and myth.

His literary education also included sustained reading of Homer. Lewis and his reading companion first extracted the Achillea from the Iliad, setting the rest aside, and then read the Odyssey in full, day after day and month after month. He later judged his youthful response romanticized by William Morris, but saw that limitation as less damaging than a rigid, supposedly classical approach. The Odyssey’s wanderings remained important to him, and rereading allowed the early imaginative response to survive while becoming more mature.

A later remembered scene associated with the period’s reading life places Lewis at a bookstall on a cold evening, where he chose a worn Everyman edition of George MacDonald’s Phantastes. The train was arriving, and the porter called out the village names on the Bookham, Effingham, Horsley line. Lewis began the book that evening. The remembered details preserve reading not as an abstract influence but as an event attached to a particular book, journey, and beginning.

Belief, Doubt, and the Supernatural

The period’s imaginative openness did not amount to settled religious belief. Lewis recalled that classical study, especially the reading of Virgil, presented religious ideas as if they were simply illusions. Teachers and editors treated Pagan belief as false without explaining how Christianity might fulfill or be foreshadowed by it. This approach contributed to his doubts because it left other religions neither meaningfully interpreted nor persuasively accounted for; Christianity appeared to be granted an exception rather than related to the wider history of religious thought.

W. B. Yeats offered a different challenge to Lewis’s assumptions. Having read Yeats’s poetry for some time, Lewis recognized a distinction after encountering prose works such as Rosa Alchemica and Per Arnica Silentia Lunae: Yeats believed in the “ever living ones” as beings whose world could make contact with ours, and took magic seriously. Lewis understood this belief as more than poetic invention or wishful imagining. The discovery unsettled the easy separation between religion as delusion and the modern world as self-evidently disenchanted.

Looking back on the broader movement of belief, Lewis described churchgoing at one stage as symbolic and provisional, while he and Griffiths both believed in God and remained willing to hear more from Pagan or Christian sources. Religious plurality was beginning to arrange itself differently in his mind. The possibility that Pagan myth might be treated with respect, together with a remark about the Dying God that suggested the story had once truly happened, helped redirect the question: instead of choosing one supposedly true religion from among many, Lewis began to consider how religious traditions might relate to one another.

Narrative Shape and Significance

The Classic period is presented retrospectively as a sequence of changes rather than as a neatly resolved stage. The contrast between the brothers’ experiences at Wyvern shows how the same institution could produce sharply different meanings; the movement from poetry to Wagner and myth shows how aesthetic encounters accumulated into a durable imaginative disposition. Their force depends on recurrence and revision: an early response can remain meaningful even after its limitations have been recognized.

The account also preserves unresolved tensions. Lewis’s attraction to supernatural ideas coexists with religious doubt, while his education supplies classical learning without offering a satisfying account of the religions it discusses. Later reflection makes these tensions legible without pretending that the boy already possessed the conclusions of the adult narrator. The period’s lasting importance is thus its record of formation: school conflicts, remembered books, and changing interpretive habits begin to alter what counts as credible, beautiful, or possible.