Collected Letters Volume Two: Books, Broadcasts and War, 1931–1949. Walter Hooper
Чтение книги онлайн.
Читать онлайн книгу Collected Letters Volume Two: Books, Broadcasts and War, 1931–1949 - Walter Hooper страница 75
Название: Collected Letters Volume Two: Books, Broadcasts and War, 1931–1949
Автор: Walter Hooper
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Биографии и Мемуары
isbn: 9780007332663
isbn:
73 Scott, Waverley. ch. 6: ‘The laird was only rejoiced that his worthy friend, Sir Everard Waverley of Waverley-Honour, was reimbursed of the expenditure which he had outlaid on account of the house of Bradwardine…A yearly intercourse took place, of a short letter and a hamper or a cask or two, between Waverley-Honour and Tully-Veolan, the English exports consisting of mighty cheeses and mightier ale, pheasants, and venison, and the Scottish returns being vested in grouse, white hares, pickled salmon, and usquebaugh.’
74 Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, trans. John W. Harvey (London: Oxford University Press, 1923; 7th impression, 1936).
75 René Guénon (1886–1950), Sufi and founder of the Traditionalist School. The ‘ex-pupil’ was Martin Lings, a member of Guénon’s household in Egypt and a convert to Traditionalism. See Martin Lings in the Biographical Appendix, and Lings’ essay, ‘René Guénon’, Sophia: The journal of the Traditional Studies, I, no. 1 (Summer 1995).
76 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Aids to Reflection (1825), Aphorism VIIIb: ‘Understanding is discursive; Reason is fixed. The Understanding in all its judgments refers to some other faculty as its ultimate authority; The Reason in all its decisions appeals to itself as the ground and substance of their truth.
Understanding is the faculty of reflection; Reason [the faculty] of contemplation.’
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (1817), ch. 13: ‘The primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime Agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary imagination I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of Its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation…Fancy, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with but fixities and definites. The fancy is indeed no other than a mode of memory emancipated from the order of time and space; and blended with, and modified by that empirical phenomenon of the will which we express by the word choice’.
77 The medieval term for ‘poetry’.
78 Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Part I, Question 1, Article 9, ‘Whether Holy Scripture Should Use Metaphors’: Objection 1. ‘It seems that Holy Scripture should not use metaphors. For that which is proper to the lowest science seems not to befit this science, which holds the highest place of all. But to proceed by the aid of various similitudes and figures is proper to poetry, the least of all the sciences. Therefore it is nut fitting that this science should make use of such similitudes.’ Reply: ‘Poetry makes use of metaphors to produce a representation, for it is natural to man to be pleased with representations. But sacred doctrine makes use of metaphors as both necessary and useful.’ ibid., Part I, Question 115, Article 5: ‘We know by experience that many things are done by demons, for which the power of heavenly bodies would in no way suffice: for instance, that a man in a state of delirium should speak an unknown tongue, recite poetry and authors of whom he has no previous knowledge.’
79 ‘poetry is the art of speaking in verses. Question 1: Whether rhythm is a type of verse.’
80 ‘by its activity, through contact, as from its appearance’. These are the criteria St Thomas Aquinas uses in the Summa Theologica, Part I. Question 75, Article 1 to discuss whether the soul has a body.
81 ‘through the path of the will’. This was a standard concern of the Church Fathers.
82 Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Part II, Question 27, Article 5.
83 John 1:12.
TO JOAN BENNETT (L):1
[Magdalen College]
13 January 1937
A foul copy of an essay (which now that I re-read it doesn’t seem as good as I had hoped) is a poor return for the delightful, the champagne holiday you gave me. But you asked for it and here it is.2
What splendid talk goes on in your house!—and what a wonderful thing…your English Faculty is. If only we and you could combine into a single teaching body (leaving out your freaks and nonentities) we could make ‘English’ into an education that would not have to fear any rivalries. In the meantime we have lots to exchange. I am sure you practise more ‘judgement’; I suspect we have more ‘blood’. What we want is to be well commingled.
The Lucas book proves disappointing as you go on.3 His attack on Richards4 for splitting up poetic effects which we receive as a unity, is silly; that is what analysis means and R. never suggested that the products of analysis were the same as the living unity. Again, he doesn’t seem to see that Richards is on his side in bringing poetry to an ethical test in the long run; and his own ethical standard is so half-hearted—he’s so afraid of being thought a moralist that he tries to blunt it by gas about ‘health’ and ‘survival’. As if survival can have any value apart from the prior value of what survives. To me especially it is an annoying book; he attacks my enemies in the wrong way…and a good deal of mere ‘superiority’ too…
TO JOAN BENNETT (L):
[Magdalen College
February 1937]
I also have been having ’flu or you should have heard from me sooner. I enclose the article: pray make whatever use you please of it5…It is a question (for your sake and that of the Festschrift, not mine) whether a general pro-Donne paper called Donne and his critics—a glance at Dryden and Johnson and then some contemporaries including me—wouldn’t be better than a direct answer. C.S.L. as professional controversialist and itinerant prize-fighter is, I suspect, becoming already rather a bore to our small public, and might in that way infect you.6 Also, if you really refute me, you raise for the editor the awkward question, ‘Then why print the other article?’ However, do just as you like…and good luck with it whatever you do.
I’ve had a grand week in bed—Northanger Abbey, The Moonstone,7 The Vision of judgement,8 Modern Painters (Vol. 3),СКАЧАТЬ