To me it seems that a great many different emotions are united in the perception of beauty: it may turn out to be not a simple thing but a result of unions. For one thing nearly all beautiful sights are to me chiefly important as reminders of other beautiful sights: without memory twould be a poor affair. The process presumably has a beginning but once going it grows like a snowball. Could it be that joy remembered (‘Which now is sad because it has been sweet’) is a necessary element in Beauty? There is too, I think, a purely sensuous element: that such and such notes or tints (in themselves — not in their combinations) just happen to satisfy our nerves of hearing & sight — as certain foods satisfy those of tastes. This wd. be rather a condition of beauty, perhaps, than an element in it. One thing is plain, that the statements continually made about Beauty’s being pure contemplation, stirring no impulse, being the antithesis of the practical or energizing side of us, are wrong. On the contrary beauty seems to me to be always an invitation of some sort & usually an invitation to we don’t know what. A wood seen as ‘picturesque’ by a fool (who’d like a frame round it) may be purely contemplated: seen as ‘beautiful’ it seems rather to say ‘come to me’.

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“Letter to Leo Baker, July 1921,” in Collected Letters, V. I, 568.

I take it that in every marriage natural love sooner or later, in a high or low degree, comes up against difficulties (if only the difficulty that the original state of ‘being in love’ dies a natural death) which force it either to turn into dislike or else to turn into Christian charity. For all our natural feelings are, not resting places, but points d’appui, springboards. One has to go on from there, or fall back from there. The merely human pleasure in being loved must either go bad or become the divine joy of loving.

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“Letter to Mary Van Deusen, 23 July 1953,” Collected Letters, V. III, 351.

Now the second reason [for marriage given in the Common Book of Prayer] involves the whole Christian view of sex. It is all contained in Christ’s saying that two shall be ‘one flesh’. He says nothing about two ‘who married for love’: the mere fact of marriage at all – however it came about — sets up the ‘one flesh’. There is a terrible comment on this in I Cor VI 16 ‘he that is joined to a harlot is one flesh’. You see? Apparently, if Christianity is true, the mere fact of sexual intercourse sets up between human beings a relation wh. has, so to speak, transcendental repercussions — some eternal relation is established whether they like it or not.

This sounds very odd. But is it? After all, if there is an eternal world and if our world is its manifestation, then you would expect bits of it to ’stick through’ into ours. We are like children pulling the levers of a vast machine of which most is concealed. We see a few little wheels that buzz round on this side when we start it up — but what glorious or frightful processes we are initiating in there, we don’t know. That’s why it is so important to do what we’re told (cf. — what does the Holy Communion imply about the real significance of eating?)

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“Letter to Mary Newlan, 18 April 1940,” Collected Letters, V. II, 394.

The modern tradition is that the proper reason for marrying is the state described as ‘being in love’. Now I have nothing to say against ‘being in love’: but the idea that this is or ought to be the exclusive reason or that it can ever be by itself an adequate basis seems to me simply moonshine.

In the first place, many ages, many cultures, and many individuals don’t experience it — and Christianity is for all men, not simply for modern Western Europeans. Secondly, if often unites most unsuitable people. Thirdly, is it not usually transitory? Doesn’t the modern emphasis on ‘love’ lead people either into divorce or into misery, because when that emotion dies down they conclude that their marriage is a ‘failure’, tho’ in fact they have just reached the point at wh. real marriage begins. Fourthly, it wd. be undesirable, even if it were possible, for the people to be ‘in love’ all their lives. What a world in wd. be if most of the people we met were perpetually in this trance!

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“Letter to Mary Newlan, 18 April 1940,” Collected Letters, V. II, 392-3.

‘How like a god’ is a man until he makes the fatal false step of claiming divinity and goes plumb down to devilhood.

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“Letter to Daphne Harwood, 06 March 1942,” The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Vol. II, 512.

My view of Being-in-love is that (like everything except God and the Devil) it is better than some things and worse than others. Thus it comes in my scale of values higher than lust, selfishness, or frigidity, but lower than charity or constancy — in fact about on a level with friendship. Like everything (except God and the Devil) it therefore is sometimes opposed to things lower than itself and — in that situation — good: sometimes to things higher than itself and in that situation — bad. Thus Being-in-love is a better motive for marriage than, say, worldly advancement: but the intention to obey God’s will by entering into an indissoluble partnership in all virtue and mutual charity for the preservation of chastity and the admission of new souls to the chance of eternal life is better even than Being-in-love.

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“Letter to Daphne Harwood, 06 March 1942,” The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Vol. II, 510-11.

I am so glad you have really enjoyed a Morris once again I had the same feeling about it as you, in a way, with this proviso — that I don’t think Morris was conscious of the meaning either here or in any of his works, except Love is Enough where the flame actually breaks through the smoke so to speak. I feel more and more that Morris has taught me things he did not understand himself. These hauntingly beautiful lands which somehow never satisfy, — this passion to escape from death plus the certainty that life owes all its charm to mortality — these push you on to the real thing because they fill you with desire and yet prove absolutely clearly that in Morris’s world that desire cannot be satisfied.

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“Letter to Arthur Greeves, 22 Sept. 1931,” Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Vol. I, 970.