Homeliness

Homeliness is Arthur’s name for the rooted beauty of ordinary life, and his most lasting gift to Lewis’s way of seeing. It changed what counted as worthy of attention: alongside myth and marvel, the novels, weather, food, family, neighborhood, and unremarkable rural scenes could offer a distinctive imaginative pleasure.

A Name for the Ordinary

Arthur called classic English novelists the writers of “the good, solid, old books.” Lewis had largely avoided them: his early encounter with Thackeray had come too soon, Dickens had acquired an enduringly unpleasant association through its illustrations, and his knowledge of Scott was limited to some of the weaker medieval novels. Under Arthur’s influence, he read the best Waverleys, the Brontës, and Jane Austen. These books complemented his more fantastic reading, and their contrast made each kind of literature more enjoyable.

The change involved more than a revision of literary taste. Lewis had regarded such novels’ qualities as stodginess or ordinariness; Arthur taught him to see their charm as “Homeliness.” The term meant more than domesticity. It named the way a work could be rooted in simple experience—in weather, food, family, and neighborhood—and make those familiar particulars matter.

How Homeliness Is Seen

Arthur’s attention settled on details that might otherwise pass unnoticed. The opening sentence of Jane Eyre could give him endless pleasure, as could the opening of a Hans Andersen story, “How it did rain, to be sure.” Even the word “beck” in the Brontës, along with scenes in schoolrooms and kitchens, became a source of delight. His response made ordinary words and settings newly legible as aesthetic experience.

That attentiveness extended outdoors. Lewis’s own response to nature had been narrowly romantic: he was drawn chiefly to what seemed awe-inspiring, wild, eerie, or distant. Mountains and clouds especially delighted him, as did the changing kinds and heights of cirrus, cumulus, and raincloud. His childhood country had strengthened this disposition, while the Green Hills glimpsed through the nursery window had given distance an early imaginative force. Arthur shared Lewis’s outdoor pleasures, but his search for the Homely redirected attention from the horizon toward nearby, familiar life.

Ordinary Scenes and Their Contrasts

Arthur taught Lewis to notice the beauty of vegetables destined for the pot, calling them “Just ordinary drills of cabbages—what can be better?” He would draw Lewis’s eyes back from the horizon and through a gap in a hedge. There, the scene might be no more than a farmyard in mid-morning, a gray cat slipping under a barn door, or a bent old woman returning from the pigsty with an empty bucket. The pleasure lay partly in the particularity of what was seen: work, animals, and domestic surroundings without any claim to grandeur.

Their strongest delight came when the Homely met the unhomely. A small kitchen garden might climb a narrowing patch of fertile ground hemmed in by outcroppings and furze; elsewhere, a shivering quarry pool under a rising moon could stand beside the smoking chimney and lamplit window of a cottage settling down for the night. The scenes retain the wildness that had already appealed to Lewis, but set it against habitation and daily life. Homeliness does not erase the uncanny or the distant; it brings them into relation with the familiar.

Influence and Significance

Arthur’s influence endured because it enlarged Lewis’s imaginative range rather than replacing one taste with another. Myth and marvel remained shared interests, and Lewis’s romantic responsiveness to mountains, clouds, and distance persisted. Homeliness supplied a complement: the rooted and commonplace could be valued on their own terms, and the familiar landscape could hold both rural detail and strangeness.

The concept thus marks a change in attention as much as a literary preference. Through Arthur, Lewis learned to look not only toward remote heights and the horizon but through a hedge, at a cabbage drill, or into the life implied by a schoolroom, kitchen, farmyard, and cottage window. What had seemed merely ordinary became a durable part of his imaginative world.