Tree by Tolkien by Colin Wilson Read Free Book Online Page B

1914—Tolkien was twenty-two, and his formative period was over.

    I strongly suspect that Chesterton was the major influence during this period. The clues are scattered throughout the essay On Fairy-Stories (delivered at St. Andrews in 1938.) Speaking, for example, about suspension of disbelief, the 'enchanted state' which some people can achieve when watching a cricket match, he says: 'I can achieve (more or less) willing suspension of disbelief, when I am held there and supported by some other motive that will keep away boredom: for instance, a wild, heraldic preference for dark blue rather than light'—a sentence that could easily have been written by Chesterton. He speaks about one of the important functions of the fairy story, to produce a state of 'recovery', 'regaining of a clear view'. 'We need ... to clean our windows; so that the things seen clearly may be freed from the drab blur of triteness or familiarity—from possessiveness.' He then goes on to speak of ' Mooreeffoc ' or Chestertonian fantasy. ' Mooreeffoc is a fantastic word, but it could be seen written up in every town in this land. It is Coffee-room, viewed from inside through a glass door, as it was seen by Dickens on a dark London day; and it was used by Chesterton to denote the queerness of things that have become trite, when they are seen suddenly from a new angle.'
    Readers of early Chesterton books— Napoleon of Notting Hill , The Man Who Was Thursday , the early Father Brown stories—will recollect that Disneyland atmosphere. 'It was one of those journeys on which a man perpetually feels that now at last he must have come to the end of the universe, and then finds he has only come to the beginning of Tufnell Park, London died away in draggled taverns and dreary scrubs, and then was unaccountably born again in blazing high streets and blatant hotels ...' What Chesterton is describing here (in The Blue Cross ) might have come out of a novel by Graham Greene; but the way in which he describes it makes it somehow mysterious and exhilarating. 'Abruptly one bulging and gas-lit window broke the blue twilight like a bull's eye lantern; and Valentin stopped an instant before a little garish sweetstuff shop.' Dickens occasionally commanded that magic; for example, in Pickwick Papers and A Christmas Carol ; and J.B. Priestley catches it in a few of his novels. Tolkien set out to take it out of 'this world', to create it in isolation, or rather, in its own setting, in 'fairy land'.
    This immediately suggests another name—W. B. Yeats. Not only because Yeats wrote about fairies, but because he attached a particular symbolic meaning to them. There is a sharp dichotomy in Yeats between 'this world' and a world of deeper meaning that poets glimpse in moments of intensity. There is no space here to discuss this point at length; besides, I have done so elsewhere. 1 But I would suggest that the dichotomy between 'this world' and that more meaningful reality is a false one; what is at issue is an attitude , like the difference between Greene and Chesterton. Tolkien grasps this when he says, echoing Blake: 'We need ... to clean our windows.' In certain exhilarated moods, the poet sees the world as endlessly exciting and interesting; in such states of insight, it seems clear to him that all one needs is intelligence and imagination, and the vision can be renewed every day. The really baffling thing is why this vision is so difficult to sustain. The straightforward view is that most human beings are tied down to dreary everyday affairs, like Dickens in his blacking factory or Wells in his drapery emporium, and that all the embryonic Dickenses and Wellses need is freedom. We soon discover that the problem is more complicated than that; even intelligent and imaginative men are often bored. For some reason, this sense of the world as an endlessly meaningful place slips away from us when we need it most. Boredom is one of the great mysteries of psychology. It seems to be