Word: evil
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...great masters, the greatest have a quality beyond the temporal, which Picasso lacks, and shock tactics are not a final way to alter human vision. The crux and center of Picasso's art is, in my view, hysteria, and in this he so echoes the prevailing evil of his age that he seems to be its prophet...
...fairy tales. In the introduction to his recent anthology of Macdonald's work (TIME, June 2), Lewis confesses the importance of that day's purchase: "I had already been waist-deep in Romanticism; and likely enough, at any moment, to flounder into its darker and more evil forms, slithering down the steep descent that leads from the love of strangeness to that of eccentricity and thence to that of perversity. Now Phantasies was romantic enough in all conscience; but there was a difference. . . . What it actually did to me was to convert, even to baptise . . . my imagination...
...first novel, War in Heaven, told of a cops-&-robbers chase through modern England which followed when somebody turned up with the Holy Grail. The Williams books inspired Lewis to write a trilogy (Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, That Hideous Strength) dealing with the forces of Good and Evil at war on the planets of the solar system. One element common to all these stories: the villain of the piece is always a scientist...
...consistent identification of scientists with the forces of evil is characteristic of Lewis. To him, scientists seem, most nearly to embody the Christian sin of Pride-setting up the human will against the Divine. For this sin, Adam & Eve were expelled from the Garden and the heroes of Greek tragedy were punished by the gods. Lewis is a bitter academic opponent of Oxford's "progressive element" of scientists and "practical" faculty members who would lay more stress on "useful" courses than on Oxford's traditional concern with the humanities...
...which such things could happen. It is all of that, and more. It makes the oversimplified diagnosis and prescription of most social tracts look like so much complacent blueprint. It is filled, in every scene, with an awareness of the pitiful complexity of the causes of even simple evil. The jailers, bureaucrats, magistrates, lawyers and priests who are cogs in the machinery of destruction are savagely caricatured, but each one of them is presented with compassion and understanding, as well as rage. Institutions and individuals alike are shown to be staggering not only under their own intrinsic sins but also...