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

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СКАЧАТЬ and am very much impressed. A good deal of it, of course, is difficult to one so ignorant of science as I am, but it is all interesting and, I expect, deserves most serious consideration. Has any notice been taken of it in ‘orthodox’ scientific circles? What particularly stuck in my mind—more as a tragedy than as a theorem—is the illustrated ‘rake’s progress’ of the Chimpanzee. What a subject for a poem! By the bye I have met a young philosophical tutor at New College (Crossland)⁶⁸ who seems—which is rare at Oxford—to be well informed about Anthroposophy, and sympathetic tho’ not converted. I think that is really more important for you than an out and out convert would be: it is a great point gained when a movement begins to be treated with respect by those who are not members of it. Incidentally, he is in several ways the most intelligent new acquaintance I have made for several years.

I hope you have not misinterpreted my long silence. I have the most grateful memories of my last week end with you and value the novel honour of my God-sibbe⁶⁹ very much. How is my godson? I hope his laughing all through the service does not mean that he is going to grow up an esprit fort: but as soon as he is old enough I shall try to collaborate with you in preventing this.

How is Stein?—a man I would like to meet again. And how is yourself and the guideman⁷⁰ and the children? We are all pretty well, though Mrs. Moore is almost worn out with the Christmas charities, which ‘an autumn ’twas that grew the more by reaping.’⁷¹ We would all very much like to see you at the Kilns again when you can manage it. I have been disgustingly busy for a long long time: each year jobs seem to increase on one—as no doubt you find. Please give Cecil my love and accept all our best wishes for the new year.

      Yours (penitent)

      C. S. Lewis

1 See Guy Noel Pocock in the Biographical Appendix. Pocock was the editor for J. M. Dent of The Pilgrim’s Regress.

2 Bodleian Library, MS. Facs. d. 297, fol. 27.

3 ibid., fol. 28. Lewis’s original title, which appeared on the proofs, was The Pilgrim’s Regress, or Pseudo-Bunyan’s Periplus: An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason and Romanticism.

4 In Charles Lamb, Essays of Elia (1823). ‘Elia’ was a name Lamb adopted for himself.

5 This was J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit: or There and Back Again, parts of which were probably rewritten before it was published in 1937.

6 Mary McQueen McEldowney, ‘The Fairy Tales and Fantasies of George MacDonald’ (1934). A copy is in the Bodleian Library, MSS B. Litt. d. 257.

7 The title was shortened to The Pilgrim’s Regress: An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason and Romanticism.

8 James Adams McNeill (1853–1907), who had been Lewis’s mother’s leather at the Methodist College, Belfast, was Headmaster of Campbell College, 1890–1907. He and his wife, Margaret Cunningham McNeill, lived in Strandtown with their daughter Jane (‘Tchainie’) McNeill, a close friend of Lewis and Arthur Greeves.

9 Lewis is referring to the book eventually published as The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (1936).

10 See Nevill Coghill (1899–1980) in the Biographical Appendix to CL I. Coghill, a member of the Inklings, was Fellow of English at Exeter College, Oxford, 1924–57, and Merton Professor of English Literature, 1957–66.

11 John Norman Bryson (1896–1976) was born in Portadown, Co. Armagh, and educated at the Queen’s University, Belfast, and at Merton College, Oxford, taking his BA from Oxford in 1922. He was a lecturer in English at Balliol, Merton and Oriel College, 1923–1940, and Fellow and Tutor in English Literature at Balliol College, 1940–63.

12 Alexandre Dumas, The Three Musketeers (1844).

13 Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The Princess (1847), part 4, song (added 1850): ‘The horns of elfland faintly blowing!’

14 John Buchan, The Three Hostages [1924].

15 Arthur Alan Hanbury-Sparrow, The Land-Locked Lake [1932].

16 He is imagining a comment his father might make.

17 He is referring to Hanbury-Sparrow’s The Land-Locked Lake, mentioned in the letter to Arthur Greeves of 25 March 1933.

18 There is no true English equivalent. Essentially Lewis meant ‘sympathy for the living’ (more literally

is a desire to encourage growth or nourishment).

19 Hanbury-Sparrow, The Land-locked Lake, Part I, ch. 3, p. 287: ‘Sometimes it frightened you, this terrific power that discipline held over modern men. We’d get our drafts of reluctant but sensible conscripts, and of returned wounded undergoing God alone knew what agonies of fear, and in a few weeks we’d turn them into troops as brave, if not as skilful, as any the battalion had ever had. Once an officer knew the trick of it, it was all so terribly easy.’

20 ibid., Part I, ch. 5, p. 60: ‘Spirit wept, for it knew that the reign of materialism, of metal against flesh, would henceforth have to rule.’

21 ‘a commander hateful to the gods’. Aristophanes Peace, line 1172.

22 Edmund Blunden, Undertones of War (1928).

23 Owen Barfield, ‘The Philosophy of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’, Anthroposophy, 7 (Christmas 1932), pp. 385–404. Reprinted in Owen Barfield, Romanticism Comes of Age (1944).

24 Barfield, Romanticism Comes of Age, p. 149: ‘His extraordinarily unifying mind was too painfully aware that you cannot really say one thing correctly without saying СКАЧАТЬ