Don't hold back, Hugh, tell us what you really think of C. S. Lewis...

C. S. Lewis

Photograph by Arthur Strong, 1947

"...the face and figure of a hog-reeve or earthy-stopper"

(Image from Wikipedia)

For our prurient erudition, here's a quote from a letter that Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote about C. S. Lewis to Bernard Berenson, describing Lewis with intellectual and aristocratic disdain as:

"a man who combines the face and figure of a hog-reeve or earthy-stopper with the mind and thought of a Desert Father of the fifth century, preoccupied with meditations of inelegant theological obscenity: a powerful mind warped by erudite philistinism, blackened by systematic bigotry, and directed by a positive detestation of such profane frivolities as art, literature and (of course) poetry: a purple-faced bachelor and misogynist, living alone in rooms of inconceivable hideousness, secretly consuming vast quantities of his favourite dish -- beefsteak-and-kidney-pudding; periodically trembling at the mere apprehension of a feminine footfall; and all the while distilling his morbid and illiberal thoughts into volumes of best-selling prurient religiosity and ... reactionary nihilism."

You can read this fine quote in Richard King's review (in "arts, books, other reviews") of Letters from Oxford: Hugh Trevor-Roper to Bernard Berenson (edited by Richard Davenport-Hines, published in England by Weidenfeld and Nicolson).

King, who calls Trevor-Roper "an acquired taste," also cites one of his old teachers, who in commenting on seventeenth century historiography informed him "that it was sad and troubling that the Marxist historian and Master of Balliol Christopher Hill was such a nice man but wrong, whereas the Regius Professor of Modern History, Hugh Trevor-Roper, was a very unpleasant man but right" about politics, economics, and history.

He wasn't right about the forged Hitler Diaries, of course.

For your further reading, the webpage "arts, books, other reviews" is published in the September 2006 issue of the online journal New Directions, which is part of a larger website, Trushare (aka The Cost of Conscience), "an Association of Anglican priests from all over the world ... committed to Safeguarding our Heritage: the Deposit of Faith, once delivered to the saints, which has been entrusted to us for the present time."

Amazing, the places that Gypsy Scholar leads the unwary reader, advancing "swiftly rowld / In tangles" through "wandering mazes lost"(cf. Paradise Lost 9.631-632, 2.561)...