Collected Letters Volume Two: Books, Broadcasts and War, 1931–1949. Walter Hooper

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СКАЧАТЬ quotations at the beginnings of the Books are of course never looked at at all by most readers, so I don’t think they matter much.

2. Simplicity. I expect your dissatisfaction on this score points to some real, perhaps v. deep seated, fault: but I am sure it cannot be remedied—least of all in a book of controversy. Also there may be some real difference of conception between you and me. You remember we discussed last summer how much more sympathy you had than I with the Puritan simplicity. I doubt if I interpret Our Lord’s words⁹² quite in the same way as you. I think they mean that the spirit of man must become humble and trustful like a child and, like a child, simple in motive, i.e. disinterested, not scheming and ‘on the look out’. I don’t think He meant that adult Christians must think like children: still less that the processes of thought by wh. people become Christians must be childish processes. At any rate the intellectual side of my conversion was not simple and I can describe only what I know. Of course it is only too likely that much of the thought in P.R. offends against simplicity simply by being confused or clumsy! And where so, I wd. gladly emend it if I knew how.

      We have had a most glorious autumn here—still, windless days, red sunsets, and all the yellow leaves still on the trees. I wish you could have seen it. This is a Saturday evening after a hard week, so you will excuse me if I close. I will try and write again soon but can’t promise. It was very nice to see your hand again. Your peculier spellinge is indeerd bi long associashuns!*

      Yours,

      Jack

1 Henry Rider Haggard, The People of the Mist (1894).

2 Charles Kingsley, Hereward the Wake (1866).

3 i.e. Wuthering Heights. See the letter to Warnie of Christmas Day 1931, pp. 31–2.

4 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790).

5 Walter Pater, Marius the Epicurean (1885).

6 The books and papers they had brought over from Little Lea, their family home in Belfast.

7 Lieutenant-Colonel and Mrs J, A. C. Kreyer were the Lewises’ closest neighbours. They lived in Tewsfield, a house adjoining the north-west side of The Kilns property.

8 Foord-Kelcey’s favourite book was Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–67).

9 William Wordsworth, The Prelude; or, Growth of a Poet’s Mind (1850), I, i, 290.

10 William Wordsworth, The White Doe of Rylstone (1815).

11 In his letter of 24 October 1931, p. 5.

12 Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, 1770, vol. II, p. 123. ‘Law, (said he,) fell latterly into the reveries of Jacob Boehme, whom Law alleged to have been somewhat in the same state with St. Paul, and to have seen unutterable things. Were it even so, (said Johnson,) Jacob would have resembled St. Paul still more, by not attempting to utter them.’

13 William Morris, Child Christopher and Goldilind the Fair (1893).

14 William Morris, The Life and Death of Jason (1867).

15 John Barbour, The Bruce (1376).

16 René Descartes, Discourse on Method (1637).

17 Lewis was giving Warnie an imitation of their father.

18 WHL, p. 200.

19 Robert Segar (1879–1961) was a barrister until, at the age of forty, he went to Magdalen College and read Law. He was Lecturer in Jurisprudence at Wadham College and Tutor in Law at Magdalen College, 1919–21, and Fellow of Magdalen, 1921–35. See Lewis’s portrait of him in the Magdalen College Appendix to AMR, in which he says of Segar: ‘He brings about him the air of a bar parlour to sit with him is to be snug and jolly and knowing and not unkindly, and to forget that there are green fields or art galleries in the world. All this is the side he shows us day by day: but there is more behind, for he is i war wreck and spends his nights mostly awake.’

20 Sir Waller Scott, The Monastery (1820).

21 Wynyard School in Watford, Hertfordshire, was the boys’ preparatory school attended by the Lewis brothers, who both hated their time there. Warnie was a pupil 1905–9, and Jack, who was there 1907–9, referred to it as ‘Belsen’ in SBJ, ch. 2.

22 Sir Walter Scott, The Abbot 0820); Rob Roy (1817); The Antiquary (1816).

23 In Co. Antrim.

24 Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, 3 October 1773. vol. V, p. 382. ‘I upbraided myself, as not having a sufficient cause for putting myself in such danger. Piety afforded me comfort; yet I was disturbed by the objections that have been made against a particular providence, and by the arguments of those who maintain that it is in vain to hope that the petitions of an individual, or even of congregations, can have any influence with the Deity.’

25 Dr Samuel Ogden, Sermons on the Efficacy of Prayers and Intercession (1770).

26 ‘to-ing and fro-ing’,

27 Over the years Jack and Warnie preserved 100 of their father’s characteristic sayings which they copied into a notebook entitled ‘Pudaita Pie’. This was the source of many of the sayings of Albert found in SBJ. In the end, they decided against including the document in the Lewis Papers. The manuscript of ‘Pudaita Pie’ is found in the Wade Center at Wheaton College.

28 The Count СКАЧАТЬ