Lewis was fond of referring to himself as an Old Western Man, one of a soon-to-be-extinct species: a veritable dinosaur. As a classically educated member of the Anglo-Irish middle class, one born at the turn of the century, his opinions to most modernists must certainly appear Paleolithic. He was not a political man, seldom read the papers, and thought Tito was king of Greece. His political opinions, when he did express them, might be labeled “cottage conservatism.” His was a pure rightism born of political ignorance and a rightly ordered heart. His private life at the Kilns, with brother and friends, reflected the highest order of conservative living: oblivious privacy, personal piety, and intermittent intellectual warfare with “principalities and powers.” These essays reflect those few times when the dinosaur made war with modernism: Oxfordius Rex versus Mecha-Godzilla.

The left has already started to pull the Old Thing down. At a recent conference at Seattle and Seattle Pacific Universities celebrating the achievement of Lewis and Chesterton, Walter Hooper, Lewis’s literary executor, humorously recounted the latest ideological method of Lewis criticism called “snapping.” (Hugo Dyson, apparently, first labeled this little game of ideological tag, based on a children’s card game in which one calls “snap” when the appropriate card is displayed.) The liberal critic now walks through C.S. Lewis’s work and cries out his impassioned “snaps” at the slightest sighting of out-of-favor opinions.

“Snap,” the dinosaur is no pacifist: “We know from the experience of the last 20 years that a terrified and angry pacifism is one of the roads that lead to war.” Maybe it was an aberration. Afraid not, “snap,” his opinions on nuclear war are even worse: “If we are going to be destroyed by the atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs.”

“Snap” again, the old fuddy-duddy is insensitive to feminism: “This is the tragi-comedy of the modern woman: taught by Freud to consider the act of love the most important thing in life, and then inhibited by feminism from that internal surrender which alone can make it a complete emotional success.”

“Snap,” Lewis is a democrat, but for the wrong reasons: “I am a democrat because I believe in the Fall of Man . . . Aristotle said that some people were only fit to be slaves. I do not contradict him. But I reject slavery because I see no men fit to be masters.”

“Snap, snap, snap, snap . . . ” the game goes on.

Unlike the Abolition of Man, this book is not a sustained treatment of ideas. Nor is the collection representative of his best work. The ideological “snappers,” on the other hand, will find something to snap about on almost any page. The dinosaur, though dead, is still dangerous; even when he twitches a modernist rodent dies.

Lewis was in vogue for a period with Anglo-Catholics and Evangelicals, and he still has friends there. Expect him to get increasingly short shrift, however, from the journalistic and academic vermin scampering round his literary corpse.

[Present Concerns, by C.S. Lewis, edited by Walter Hooper; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich]