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

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СКАЧАТЬ works are the Shelburne Essays (11 vols., 1904–21), The Greek Tradition (5 vols., 1921–31), and the New Shelburne Essays (3 vols., 1928–36). Princeton University Library has in its Department of Rare Books and Special Collections the three letters from Lewis to More published in this volume, and also copies (in Lewis’s hand) of three letters from More to Lewis.

23 Paul Elmer More, The Sceptical Approach to Religion (1934).

24 ‘by the force of the term’.

25 ‘necessity’. The reference here is to the old proverb: ‘Against necessity not even the gods may fight.’

26 ‘a pure act’, in the sense of the pure actuality of God. The phrase is standard in some later Latin literature (St Bonaventure uses it, as does Aquinas to describe ‘the Divine Being’).

27 Dr Janet Spens (1876–1963) was born in Lanarkshire and educated at Glasgow University. She was joint founder and co-headmistress of Laurel Bank School, Glasgow, 1903–8, then returned to Glasgow University as Lecturer and Tutor, 1908–11. She was afterwards Fellow and Tutor in English at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, 1911–36. Her books include Spenser’s Faerie Queene: An Interpretation (1934), Two Periods of Disillusion (19091, An Essay on Shakespeare’s Relation to Tradition (1916) and Elizabethan Drama (1922).

28 Spens, Spenser’s Faerie Queene.

29 i.e. The Faerie Queene.

30 ‘burden of proof’.

31 Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros: A Study of the Christian Idea of Love, authorized trans. A. G. Hebert (London: SPCK, 1932–9).

32 Spens, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, p. 55: ‘Spenser is essentially an Elizabethan, and the Elizabethans tended to utter their more intense emotions through the imagery of human figures; the men of the nineteenth century had been trained to accept the expression of theirs through the imagery of inanimate nature.’

33 ibid., p. 68: ‘The description here [Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596), I, xii, 10, line 9] is almost Addisonian in its delineation of the mixture of superficiality and pose with naïve self-revelation and vacant wonder characteristic of an English crowd. It gives the dragon concrete reality as nothing else could do.’

34 William Lindsay Renwick, Complaints: Edmund Spenser (1928).

35 In Spenser’s Faerie Queene Dr Spens staled of Busyrane (or Busirane); ‘There has been some discussion of the meaning of Amoret’s experience, but there can, I think, be little doubt. Her tortures at the hands of Busyrane in the House of Cupid represent the mental sufferings of the young wife in consequence of the too lustful element in Sir Scudamour’s passion for her’ (p. 105). Cf., however, The Allegory of Love, ch. 12: ‘To find the real foe of Chastity, the real portrait of false love, we must turn to Malecasta and Busirane. The moment we do so we find that Malecasta and Busirane are nothing else than the main subject of this study-Courtly Love; and that Courtly Love is in Spenser’s view the chief opponent of Chastity. But Chastity for him means Britomart, married love. The story he tells is therefore part of my story; the final struggle between the romance of marriage and the romance of adultery.’

36 A Latin Dictionary founded on Andrews’ edition of Freund’s Latin Dictionary, rev. and enlarged edn by C. T. Lewis and C. Short (1879).

37 Alanus ab Insulis (c. 1128–1203) mentions ‘Genius’ in De Planctu Naturae, Prosa V, 40ff. See The Allegory of Love, p. 106.

38 John Cower (1330–1408) wrote about ‘Genius’ in Confessio Amantis, Prologue, 881ff.

39 The Garden of Adonis is described in Spenser, The Faerie Queene, II, vi, 34ff.

40 William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida (1609), IV, iv, 50; ‘Some say the Genius so/Cries “Come” to him that instantly must die.’

41 In Spenser, The Faerie Queene, II, xii.

42 Deuteronomy 33;2: ‘The Lord came from Sinai, and rose up from Seir unto them; he shined forth from mount Paran, and he came with ten thousands of saints: from his right hand went a fiery law for them.’

43 ‘You are a holy one, but you are no philosopher!’ It is not known why Lewis wrote this in Italian.

44 ‘(speaking) in a sincere spirit’.

45 This was probably Charles Hubert Sebastian de Peyer (1905–83), one of three brothers who went to Magdalen College. He was educated at Cheltenham School, after which he read PPE at Magdalen and took his BA in 1929. He was a civil servant with the Ministry of Power and a member of the UK Delegation to the High Authority in the European Coal and Steel Community, with rank of minister in the Labour Party, 1953–7. He served as borough councillor for West Hertfordshire, 1964–75.

46 David Lindsay, A Voyage to Arcturus (London: Methuen, 1920). This book was to have an important influence on Lewis’s science fiction novels; see the letters to Charles A. Brady of 29 October 1944 and to Ruth Pitter of 4 January 1947.

47 Agnes Romilly White, Gape Row [1934].

48 i.e. Gundreda Ewart. See The Ewart Family in the Biographical Appendix to CL 1.

49 The concert by the London Philharmonic Orchestra, under the direction of Sir Thomas Beecham, was performed in the Sheldonian Theatre on 15 November 1934.

50 Ludwig van Beethoven, Symphony No. 5, first performed in 1808.

51 Jean Sibelius, Tapiola, a symphonic poem first performed in 1926.

52 Edward Elgar, Enigma Variations, first performed СКАЧАТЬ