It must be remembered that in Mark’s mind hardly one rag of noble thought, either Christian or Pagan, had a secure lodging. His education had been neither scientific nor classical - merely “Modern”. The severities both of abstraction and of high human tradition had passed him by: and he had neither peasant shrewdness nor aristocratic honour to help him. He was a man of straw, a glib examinee in subjects that require no exact knowledge (he had always done well on Essays and General Papers), and the first hint of a real threat to his bodily life knocked him sprawling.

C. S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength, abridged by the author (London: Pan 1955), p. 109

There is I suspect a line to be traced from here to from the class attitudes of WWI, in which Lewis served as an officer in the Somerset Light Infantry. Pat Barker’s Regenerations makes the argument that the “severities” of the officer class’s emotional training were a significant factor in the mental collapse of many of Rivers’s patients at Craiglockhart: “classical” stoicism may not be the most sane, or sustainable, response to prolongued passivication and traumatic stress. Then again, it was only the officers who made it to Craiglockhart: ordinary rank and file soldiers who suffered breakdowns were not infrequently shot for cowardice.