Renaissance

Renaissance is the name C. S. Lewis gives to the recovery of imaginative life after boyhood, when childhood’s Joy had vanished so completely that even its memory and desire were lost. The change begins not as a gradual maturation but as a sudden return of longing, sparked by an illustration encountered at school. Its consequences unfold through poetry, Wagner, and George MacDonald, while later reflection connects this imaginative renewal to changing judgments about religion and knowledge.

Reawakening after boyhood

Lewis uses the Renaissance as an analogy for a personal rebirth, not simply as a historical period. He suspects that historians’ accounts of a fifteenth-century European renewal may project the glow of their own later reawakening onto the past. In his account, adolescence can recover what childhood once possessed but boyhood obscured: a period in which imagination sleeps while greed, noise, cruelty, and prosaic ambitions dominate.

The contrast was personal. Lewis’s childhood remained continuous with his later life, and books that had pleased him as a child could still please him; much of what he read at Oldie’s or Campbell, by contrast, seemed in retrospect like a sandy desert. The poem Sohrab and Rustum had given him a powerful aesthetic pleasure, but not Joy. For him, Joy required more than enjoyment or beauty: it carried a pang of longing that could not be satisfied by the work that awakened it.

The sudden return at Chartres

Early in his time at Chartres, the long absence of Joy ended in a moment Lewis could remember precisely but could not date. A literary periodical lay in the schoolroom; expecting nothing, he glanced at a headline and picture. The words Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods and an illustration by Arthur Rackham abruptly opened a world he had not known he was seeking.

The response was a vision of Northernness: immense, clear spaces above the Atlantic, the remoteness of the northern summer twilight, and a sense of severity and distance. The image also brought back an older imaginative world associated with Tegner’s Drapa, Balder, and the sunward-sailing cranes. With that recognition came the realization that he had once experienced Joy and had gone without it for years. The imagined distance of the gods and the distance of his lost childhood longing fused into one desire. Yet the experience had already vanished as he recognized it, turning recovery itself into a fresh awareness of loss.

From image to poetry and music

The illustration initiated an extended engagement with Wagner before Lewis had heard a note of Wagner’s music. The printed name itself became a magical sign, and he began writing a long poem based on the Ring. The project faltered as he reached the events of The Rheingold, but its failure marked a change in his sense of writing: he began trying not merely to state a story but to suggest the intensity he felt. He lost the earlier poem’s plain clarity and eventually stopped, but understood that he had learned what writing meant.

During the next holidays, Lewis first heard the Ride of the Valkyries on a record in T. Edens Osborne’s crowded, dark shop. Heard as part of heroic drama rather than as a detached concert piece, it struck him as a thunderbolt. Wagnerian records, especially from the Ring but also from Lohengrin and Parsifal, became a chief use of his pocket money and a regular request for presents. He experienced Wagner not as simply a new musical pleasure, but as a distinct kind of response—an astonishment and disturbance that did not fit his previous category of music.

A summer visit to Dundrum brought him back to the book that had started the affair: Rackham’s illustrated Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods, which he found on his cousin’s drawing-room table. He coveted it intensely and eventually obtained a cheaper edition with his brother’s help. The pictures seemed to him like music made visible, carrying the imaginative experience deeper than the original glimpse in the schoolroom.

Earlier reading and later reception

The Renaissance did not begin from a blank slate. At Campbell, reading Sohrab and Rustum in Octie’s form room had introduced Lewis to a distant, grave, and silvery imaginative atmosphere. He valued details such as the artist in Pekin, the cypress in the queen’s garden, and the hushed Chorasmian waste, though he did not then grasp the poem’s central tragedy. Years later, he found that his first encounter with Arnold had prepared him to enjoy Homer: the Iliad could feel familiar because Sohrab had already supplied a route into its poetic world. For Lewis, literary reading worked by making one text illuminate another, rather than requiring the reader to begin with expert knowledge of a source tradition.

His encounter with Phantastes, read later at Bookham, extended this imaginative history in a different direction. On an October evening at Leatherhead station, with frost in the sky and a weekend of reading ahead, he picked George MacDonald’s book from the stall. Its woodland journeys and supernatural figures seemed continuous with the stories he already loved, but the quality accompanying them was new. Lewis later named that quality holiness: the familiar imaginative materials had not disappeared, but their light had changed. The summons that had once seemed distant now felt close, and his account distinguishes the story’s imagined scenes from the spiritual quality he perceived through them.

A change in religious and intellectual possibility

The renewal of imagination coincided with a reconsideration of the assumptions that had supported Lewis’s loss of Christian faith. Classical study had presented Pagan religious ideas as delusion while treating Christianity as a supposedly exceptional truth, without showing how the traditions might relate. Lewis found that distinction difficult to justify: Christianity appeared to him to belong to the same general class of religious belief as the others, and he was ready to stop granting it special status. His pessimism was also intellectual: although he was not then unhappy, he had formed the view that the universe was, on the whole, regrettable.

Later, reading W. B. Yeats’s prose led him to recognize that Yeats seriously believed in a world of spiritual beings and possible contact with it. Maurice Maeterlinck’s engagement with Spiritualism, Theosophy, and Pantheism introduced another non-Christian challenge to materialism. Lewis did not simply accept these claims, but they opened a consequential possibility: perhaps there was something beyond the material world, without that something necessarily being Christian theology. This unsettled his materialism and revived the occult interests associated with his earlier school experience.

The longer intellectual development that followed was not identical to the first imaginative shock, but it continued to loosen the assumptions through which Lewis interpreted experience. Owen Barfield’s arguments later challenged his chronological snobbery—the belief that ideas discarded by the present age were thereby refuted—and exposed a conflict between sensory realism and the claims he still wanted to make for logic, moral judgment, and aesthetic value. The Renaissance thus names more than a return to literary excitement: it marks a recovery of desire that reopened questions about what kinds of reality, knowledge, and religious fulfillment could be taken seriously.