Talking of abbotsfording I am now reading Lockhart through, and am just at the Shetland and Orkney diary:
(#ulink_f60355f6-1c80-5bba-8e7c-e64f0944fd18) which you will constantly have been reminded of if you have read The Pirate.
(#ulink_d8327f30-629c-565e-bb96-4ff5da60945d) It is a capital book.
I am examining at the moment, but lightly as you can see from the fact that I manage about an hour’s Lockhart per diem. I hope to finish my papers on the 21st: but the Award is not till the day after Boxing Day, so that it looks like Jan. 1st for our walk, ‘from which I promise myself more satisfaction, perhaps, than is possible.’ The date will be a good omen. I am so stiff from carrying that infernal tree up that I hardly know what to do with myself.
The only thing that can really dash your home coming will be the cold: you will have to ‘cokker’ yourself like anything for the first few weeks, unless this frost breaks. Well—and now to Chaucer’s papers. But even they can hardly depress me at such a moment as this
Yours
Jack.
TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):
[The Kilns
17 December 1932]
My dear Arthur,
You really must forgive me for being a slack correspondent in term time. I think we have talked of this before! However, I was much to blame for not at least letting you have a line about W. who, thank God, turned out to be well though he had been ill, and had had a worreying summer in various ways. He had also warned us, he said, (wh. was quite true, though we all forgot it) that he might not keep up his regular correspondence during the hot weather. We were all greatly relieved.
I am sorry to hear about the flu’—one of the few ailments of which I can speak with as large an experience as your own. We have both talked of it and agreed often enough about its pleasures and pains. I hope you are quite set up by now. It was, in any case, almost worth having for its throwing you back on the old favourites. I will make a point of telling Foord-Kelsie—how pleased he will be. I wish I had your early associations with Pickwick:
(#ulink_378f818f-d265-5170-bafb-281511288b38) and yet I often feel as if I had. So many scenes come to me with the feel of a long since familiar atmosphere returning after absence—I suppose because even without having read it as a boy one has drunk in so much of the Dickensy world indirectly through quotation and talk and other orders. Certainly what I enjoy is not the jokes simply as jokes—indeed the earlier and more farcical parts like the military review and Mrs Leo Hunter’s party are rather unpleasant to me—but something festive and friendly about D’s whole world. A great deal of it (in a way how different from Macdonald’s!) the charm of goodness—the goodness of Pickwick himself, and Wardle, and both Wellers.
Thanks for your criticisms on P.R. The detailed criticisms (the ‘passages where one word less wd. make all the difference’) are what I should like best and could profit by most. Perhaps when you sent the MS back (there is no special hurry) you wd. mark on the blank opposite pages any bits that you think specially in need of improvement and add a note or two in pencil—but don’t let it be a bother to you. As to your major criticisms
1. Quotations. I hadn’t realised that they were so numerous as you apparently found them. Mr Sensible, as you rightly saw, is in a separate position: the shower of quotations is part of the character and it wd. be a waste of time to translate them, since the dialogue (I hope) makes it clear that his quotations were always silly and he always missed the point of the authors he quoted. The other ones maybe too numerous, and perhaps can be reduced & translated. But not beyond a certain point: for one of the contentions of the book is that the decay of our old classical learning is a contributary cause of atheism (see the chapter on Ignorantia). The 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 words
(#ulink_dc4ca367-243d-5047-9e0d-d2ed7f231f62) 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!* (#ulink_0adcddb4-03de-59cf-8446-c9964e3eb02c)
Yours,
Jack
1 (#ulink_ff35b98a-6065-5cd4-bc0a-211c4f057143) Henry Rider Haggard, The People of the Mist (1894).
2 (#ulink_ff35b98a-6065-5cd4-bc0a-211c4f057143) Charles Kingsley, Hereward the Wake (1866).
3 (#ulink_ff35b98a-6065-5cd4-bc0a-211c4f057143) i.e. Wuthering Heights. See the letter to Warnie of Christmas Day 1931, pp. 31–2.
4 (#ulink_ff35b98a-6065-5cd4-bc0a-211c4f057143) Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790).
5 (#ulink_8e1a943e-7e2f-594c-b6c9-d833df42a573) Walter Pater, Marius the Epicurean (1885).
6 (#ulink_c03dffc3-09df-5ea5-9333-87bf392349ff) The books and papers they had brought over from Little Lea, their family home in Belfast.
7 (#ulink_417432d3-26f0-5d21-a044-ec42e7f3125f) 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 (#ulink_7be35521-5b1b-50d7-8c82-0d84aa9bd5c7) Foord-Kelcey’s favourite book was Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–67).
9 (#ulink_53dead42-6e77-5735-a2de-8a4f12d15444) William Wordsworth, The Prelude; or, Growth of a Poet’s Mind (1850), I, i, 290.
10 (#ulink_53dead42-6e77-5735-a2de-8a4f12d15444) William Wordsworth, The White Doe of Rylstone (1815).
11 (#ulink_e3fc44dc-ac62-5e87-b79d-3acf0b2d4490) In his letter of 24 October 1931, p. 5.
12 (#ulink_e3fc44dc-ac62-5e87-b79d-3acf0b2d4490) 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 (#ulink_3685e851-88ca-5699-a8aa-6eec556bbe4b) William Morris, Child Christopher and Goldilind the Fair (1893).
14 (#ulink_04022cd7-6980-5da6-8cd3-3a8f6f16597f) William Morris, The Life and Death of Jason (1867).
15 (#ulink_0a412191-d557-54d0-9ee1-532f72fa522e) John Barbour, The Bruce (1376).
16 (#ulink_cd847f47-d51e-594b-b7e0-3f91e04dbc2f) René Descartes, Discourse on Method (1637).
17 (#ulink_b13fb08f-9363-591d-86a4-da97cb867784) Lewis was giving Warnie an imitation of their father.
18 (#ulink_c5e50ffa-4427-52d9-83b2-60c3e471e879) WHL, p. 200.
19 (#ulink_053f3811-d3bd-5e39-ad73-3c83a6d69fc8) 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 (#ulink_103ee383-c290-5f5f-aaf2-951a88c3f09d) Sir Waller Scott, The Monastery (1820).
21 (#ulink_103ee383-c290-5f5f-aaf2-951a88c3f09d) 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 (#ulink_103ee383-c290-5f5f-aaf2-951a88c3f09d) Sir Walter Scott, The Abbot 0820); Rob Roy (1817); The Antiquary (1816).
23 (#ulink_18fd88b9-5568-54c2-9231-b06c22a1b375) In Co. Antrim.
24 (#ulink_18fd88b9-5568-54c2-9231-b06c22a1b375) 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 (#ulink_18fd88b9-5568-54c2-9231-b06c22a1b375) Dr Samuel Ogden, Sermons on the Efficacy of Prayers and Intercession (1770).
26 (#ulink_f7b1d6b8-044f-58ea-9ca4-55a0fb6e5ced) ‘to-ing and fro-ing’,
27 (#ulink_f7b1d6b8-044f-58ea-9ca4-55a0fb6e5ced) 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 (#ulink_57dfe42a-540e-5813-915e-c5602a8abd30)The Count of Luxembourg is a musical play by Basil Hood, with music by F. Lehar, first performed on 20 May 1911.
29 (#ulink_ff0a4777-b98d-53a2-bf60-d091141656d7)The Arcadians is a musical play by Mark Ambient, with music by Lionel Monkton and Howard Talbot, first performed on 28 April 1909.
