A History of English Literature

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also believable. Tolkien’s work has a kind of dreamlike moral innocence, a contrast
to Lewis’s logic, ingenuity and cleverness. Lewis is fantastic or futuristic, and his
characters are children, whereas Tolkien has men, boys, ladies, elves, trolls, Orcs and
hobbits. For some readers, the modest grandeur of Tolkien’s conception is fatally
weakened by its whimsy (Treebeard) and its sentiment (the ladies). Opinions are
divided about its merit, though not about the significance of its popularity, nor
about its enormous influence.
Tolkien was one of Lewis’s ‘Inklings’, a group of men who read stories in an
Oxford pub. (Inklings are the sons of Ink.) The first Inkling to become known,
Charles Williams (1886–1945), author of Arthurian romances and theological
thrillers, is now the least known. But there was a demand for supernatural fiction.
Fantasy fiction has subsequently gained a mass market, juvenile and adolescent,
and become a cult of a non-literary kind. Fantasy has achieved further commercial
success in the visual media. Terry Pratchett, one of its more successful literary prac-
titioners, and its most facetious, has correctly remarked that it is full of junk from
J. R. R. Tolkien’s attic. Since Tolkien, the most successful exponent of fantasy fiction,
though of a far more conventional kind, is J. K. Rowling, discussed on page 432.

Poetr y

The Second World War

Like the Napoleonic Wars, the Second World War (1939–45) is remembered in
nove ls rather than in poems; partly because German bombing meant that the ‘Home
Fr ont’ was part of the battle zone. The war was entered with fewer illusions. The
Home Front was the scene of two memorable Second World War poems: ‘Naming
of Parts’ by Henry Reed, partly a parody of Auden’s ‘Spain’, and ‘In Westminster
Abbey’, by John Betjeman (1906–1984), which begins
Let me take this other glove off
As the vox humana swells, an organ stop (Lat.)
And the beauteous fields of Eden
Bask beneath the Abbey bells.
Here, where England’s statesmen lie,
Listen to a lady’s cry.

Of three young poets who fell in the war, Alun Lewis, Sidney Keyes and Keith
Douglas,Douglas wrote at least two fine poems, ‘Vergissmeinnicht’ and ‘Simplify Me
When I’m Dead’. Henry Reed, the South African F. T. Prince (1912–1995), and Roy
Fuller (1912–1991) wrote well about war and peace to the end of their long lives.
Liter ature also played a part in the war through the oratory of Winston Churchill
(1874–1965), encouraging Britons on 18 June 1940 to ‘their finest hour’:
I expec t that the battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival
of Christian civilisation. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity
of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very
soon be turned upon us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose
the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may
move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including
the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the
abyss of a new dark age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights
of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves

376 13 · FROM POST-WAR TO POST-WAR: 1920–55

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