46 (#ulink_c74008b7-e4c8-551e-89c5-3bee14d92672) In his review of E. K. Chambers’ Sir Thomas Wyatt and Some Collected Studies (1933) in Medium Aevum, III, No. 3 (October 1934), pp. 237–40, Lewis criticized Vinaver for the importance he attached to ‘sources’. ‘It is possible for our reading of an author to become what we may call ‘source-ridden’, so that we no longer see his book as it is in itself, but only as it contrasts with its sources. This is clearly an injustice to the author, for we are preserving in their original form elements which he has transmuted, and even elements which he rejected. It is as though we ate all the ingredients of a pudding along with the pudding itself; such an eating is emphatically not the pudding’s proof’(p. 238).
In note 1 of ‘Malory’s Morte d’Arthur in the Light of a Recent Discovery’, Vinaver responded: ‘I do not feel with Mr Lewis that those who see too much of Malory’s sources are apt to overlook the book “as it is in itself”. We must obviously avoid eating “all the raw ingredients of a pudding along with the pudding itself” for “such eating is emphatically not the pudding’s proof”…but literature is one of the few things to which the metaphor of the pudding does not apply. Knowledge of the recipe may spoil the caste of a pudding but it need not distort our immediate impression from a literary work. It is of course possible to read Malory “as if we knew nothing about his sources”, but our understanding of him will be deepened, not spoilt, by the knowledge of what is peculiar and unique in his work.’
47 (#ulink_f7db1fbf-8110-56d0-9803-4efcf7cf8dff) Frank Percy Wilson (1889–1963), who had been Lewis’s tutor in English, took a B. Litt. from Lincoln College, Oxford. After serving in the First World War, he returned to Oxford as a university lecturer. He was Professor of English at the University of Leeds, 1929–36, and Merton Professor of English at Oxford, 1947–57. Wilson contributed the volume on English Drama 1485–1585 (1969), ed. G. K. Hunter, to the Oxford History of English Literature.
48 (#ulink_f7db1fbf-8110-56d0-9803-4efcf7cf8dff) Bonamy Dobrée (1891–1974), distinguished scholar and lecturer, went to Christ’s College, Cambridge, after serving in the First World War. In 1936 he was appointed to the Chair of English Literature at the University of Leeds, a post he held until his retirement in 1955. His books include the volume on The Early Eighteenth Century (1959) in the Oxford History of English Literature.
49 (#ulink_f047873d-8e2d-5b3b-ab11-03cff70646b0) See the ‘Background’ to English Literature in the Sixteenth Century in CG, pp. 474–82.
50 (#ulink_6edb86e8-0b0a-5ecd-a90d-8c7b50e637c9) J. R. R. Tolkien had too many other commitments to write a volume on Old English literature, and in the end the series began with Middle English literature.
51 (#ulink_6edb86e8-0b0a-5ecd-a90d-8c7b50e637c9) Raymond Wilson Chambers (1874–1942) graduated in English from University College, London, in 1894 and spent his entire professional life at University College. He became a Fellow of English in 1900, Assistant Professor in 1904, and Professor of English, 1922–41. His works include Beowulf (1914) and Thomas More (1935).
52 (#ulink_1e4d82ee-8554-56f0-96e7-2153148b3c53) William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet (1597), II, v, 64: ‘Are you so hot? Many, come up, I trow.’
53 (#ulink_4f896610-678e-581d-b66d-4d2f0bbb1118) The guests were Molly Askins and her son Michael. Molly was the widowed daughter-in-law of Mrs Moore’s brother, Dr Robert Askins (1880–1935) who, while practising medicine in Southern Rhodesia died at sea on I September 1935.
54 (#ulink_4f896610-678e-581d-b66d-4d2f0bbb1118) James 1:27: ‘Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.’
55 (#ulink_b9e4d636-3579-5887-8f2d-baaee0c1f8d4) In the end Lewis was persuaded to call his book The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition.
56 (#ulink_8edb84a0-b12c-581d-9a71-571ba77b8143) Sheed and Ward of London published their edition of The Pilgrim’s Regress in October 1935. Lewis had been worried about obscurity in the work, and this edition differs from the first in having a short ‘Argument’ at the beginning of each of the ten books.
57 (#ulink_047021b2-3896-5417-9a6f-1f9e742ac1f8)The Workes of Sir Thomas More Knyght, sometyme Lorde Chauncellour of England, wrytten by him in the Englysh tonge, ed. William Rastell (1557).
58 (#ulink_047021b2-3896-5417-9a6f-1f9e742ac1f8)Utopia (1516), in Latin, is the principal literary work of Sir Thomas More.
59 (#ulink_ec047683-d083-5925-8816-8bbab5aedeb5) William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale (1623).
60 (#ulink_ec047683-d083-5925-8816-8bbab5aedeb5) This concert, conducted by Malcolm Sargent, was given by the London Philharmonic Orchestra in the Sheldonian Theatre on 28 November 1935, For details see The Oxford Magazine, LIV (5 December 1935), pp. 244, 246.
61 (#ulink_ec047683-d083-5925-8816-8bbab5aedeb5) Richard Wagner, Siegfried Idyll, first performed in 1870.
62 (#ulink_0e1c7111-1f76-58b3-b641-e2ce78eb959d) Beatrix Potter, Squirrel Nutkin (1903): ‘Arthur O’Bower has broken his band,/He comes roaring up the land.’
63 (#ulink_239fb3ed-6667-58d7-af3a-e9bc1b9faa48) Barfield had sent Lewis a copy of a verse-drama he had written, and which remains unpublished.
64 (#ulink_239fb3ed-6667-58d7-af3a-e9bc1b9faa48) The words ‘sheep-dotted downs’ are found in Canto V, stanza 32 of Lewis’s poem. Dymer (1926), and he discovered them in Barfield’s unpublished novel, ‘English People’.
65 (#ulink_2550c803-9d20-5cf7-9337-94ffd68e78a6) Barfield gave Lewis a copy of George MacDonald’s The Diary of an Old Soul (1885).
66 (#ulink_985d4cd4-f1cd-534b-9fa6-dc8602ad62bd) As Lewis mentions in the letter to Arthur Greeves of 29 December 1935, he was correcting the proofs of The Allegory of Love.
1936 (#ulink_b987470c-a57c-5194-97c8-bdcfb1bfba49)
TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS (W):
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford.
Jan 8th 1936
My dear Griffiths,
Thank you for your kind and interesting letter. It must be nice to know some Aristotle, and it is a relief to hear that kind of philosophy praised by you who have a right to judge: for in the Oxford world ‘Neo-Scholasticism’ has become such a fashion among ignorant undergrads. that I am sick of the sound of it. A man who was an atheist two terms ago, and admitted into your Church last term, and who had never read a word of philosophy, comes to me urging me to read the Summa
(#ulink_793558fc-9bc6-538c-af3e-04880b50bd36) and offering to lend me a copy!
By the way, I hope that the great religious revival now going on will not get itself too mixed up with Scholasticism, for I am sure that the revival of the latter, however salutary, must be as temporary as any other movement in philosophy. Of things on the natural level, now one, now another, is the ally or the enemy of Faith. The scientists have got us in such a muddle that at present rationalism is on our side, and enthusiasm is an enemy: the opposite was true in the 19th century and will be true again. I mean, we have no abiding city even in philosophy: all passes, except the Word.
I should be interested to see your Review of my little book.
(#ulink_5663011b-5e8b-5734-8c92-2ec1dbd3a32b) I am afraid it will have misled you into thinking my position more catholic than it really is, and that not for a spiritual reason but a merely literary one. I did not want to keep introducing the Lord Himself, and ‘Christianity’ is not a plausible name for a character. Hence the name, and some of the functions, of my Mother Kirk—adopted clumsily for convenience, without my realising till I began to read my reviewers, that I had given a much more ecclesiastical bent to the whole thing than I had intended. You may say ‘All the better’; but I tell you the facts to defend my honesty.
(#ulink_62d73ef3-68f9-53fc-95fa-871d1d4275e7) And by the same token, I fear Mr. Sheed is a rascal. That blurb on his jacket, insinuating that the book contains an attack on my own religious upbringing, was printed without my knowledge or authority, and he must have known it was a suggestio falsi: at least he took good care not to know!
Thank you for your prayers: you know mine too, little worth as they are. Have you found, or is it peculiar to me, that it is much easier to pray for others than for oneself. Doubtless because every return to ones own situation involves action: or to speak more plainly, obedience. That appears to me more and more the whole business of life, the only road to love and peace—the cross and the crown in one. Did you ever notice a beautiful touch in the Faerie Queene
‘a groom them laid at rest in easie bedd, His name was meek Obedience.’
(#ulink_a2b73364-263d-5ae7-abae-bcd9e82f9daa)
What indeed can we imagine Heaven to be but unimpeded obedience. I think this is one of the causes of our love of inanimate nature, that in it we see things which unswervingly carry out the will of their Creator, and are therefore wholly beautiful: and though their kind of obedience is infinitely lower than ours, yet the degree is so much more perfect that a Christian can see the reason that the Romantics had in feeling a certain holiness in the wood and water. The Pantheistic conclusions they sometimes drew are false: but their feeling was just and we can safely allow it in ourselves now that we know the real reason.
Remember me to the Prior. Did I tell you that I have met both Waterman
(#ulink_d8b88543-f717-5ce2-970a-57dc8c63d9e2) & Skinner
(#ulink_f0a48f0d-a264-52ce-8f93-3e7bf4717ce6) and liked them v. much.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS (W):
Magdalen College,
Oxford.
Feb 20th 1936
Dear Griffiths
Thanks very much for the copy of Pax and the too kind review of my little book.
