18 There is no true English equivalent. Essentially Lewis meant ‘sympathy for the living’ (more literally
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 everything. He was rightly afraid that there would not be time to say everything before going on to say the next thing, or that he would forget to do so afterwards. His incoherence of expression arose from the coherence of what he wanted to express. It was a sort of intellectual stammer.’
25 ibid., pp. 155–6. In his Treatise on Logic, says Barfield, Coleridge ‘points out how the world of grammar subsists between the two poles of verb and noun, the one expressing activity and the other passivity, the one an action and the other a state… We may think of grammar as a sort of world revolving about an axis. Only in the axis itself do the two poles coincide. And what is this axis? It is the verb “to be” itself.’
26 ibid., p. 57: ‘Sameness and Difference are the positive and negative aspects—of what? Of Likeness.’
27 ibid., p. 162: ‘Coleridge points out the startling metamorphosis of outward form which characterizes nature’s transition to the next stage of animal existence. The exuberant complexity of structure typical of the insect disappears altogether from the surface, having been withdrawn to the interior parts of the body…Nature sinks back exhausted from the line which she has hitherto been following and in her repose gathers strength for her newest creation—consciousness.’
28 See Daphne Harwood in the Biographical Appendix.
29 This was Charles Kay Ogden (1889–1957), whose works include (with I. A. Richards) The Meaning of Meaning (1923), Basic English (1930) and The Basic Words (1932). Lewis disliked The Meaning of Meaning for reasons given in his essay ‘Bluspels and Flalansferes’ in SLE.
30 Lewis is referring to his ‘Great War’ with Owen Barfield over Anthroposophy, and the document into which Lewis put many of his arguments, known as the ‘Summa’. See footnote 35 to the letter to Barfield of 16 March 1932.
31 Benedetto Croce (1866–1952), Italian philosopher and critic, whose aesthetics were profoundly influential in Italy before the Second World War. Lewis was probably referring to Croce’s most important work. Aesthetics as the Science of Expression and General Linguistics (1902).
32 Daphne Harwood’s father had thought of buying the house, Tewsfield, which almost adjoined The Kilns. The house was bought shortly after this by Mrs Alice Griggs. See note 123 to the letter to Warnie of 2 October 1939.
33 John Collier, Tom’s A-Cold: A Tale (1933).
34 William Morris, The Roots of the Mountains (1890).
35 The ‘Scotch uncles’ were the two brothers of Albert Lewis, William Lewis (1859–1946) and Richard Lewis (b. 1861). After William lost his job with the Belfast Ropeworks, in 1883 he and his brother went to Glasgow where they entered into partnership as W. & R. Lewis, Rope and Twine Manufacturers. The two brothers lived close together in the coastal town of Helensburgh, north-west of Glasgow. See The Lewis Family in the Biographical Appendix to CL I.
36 They saw Wagner’s Das Rheingold at Covent Garden on 2 May. There is an account of the performance in The Times (3 May 1933), p. 12.
* Sounds as if this were the cause of the breakdown!
37 Thomas Rice Henn (1901–74) was educated at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, where he took a BA in 1922. He was Fellow of English at St Catharine’s College, 1926–69 and Reader in Anglo-Irish Literature. His books include Longinus and English Criticism (1934) and The Bible as Literature (1970).
38 A copy of The Pilgrim’s Regress. Professor Henn kept this letter inside the cover of that book.
39 William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night (1623), III, iv, 247–9: ‘Dismount thy tuck, be yare in thy preparation, for thy assailant is quick, skilful, and deadly.’
40 See Mary Neylan in the Biographical Appendix. Lewis was her tutor in English although Mary Shelley was a member of St Hugh’s College. This letter of 21 July 1933 was written after she had taken a Fourth in English.
41 The language paper was on Anglo-Saxon which was marked with an ‘NS’ (‘non satis’ meaning ‘not satisfactory’ and a Δ (D) which is the lowest grade that can be given. Clearly, Anglo-Saxon was her undoing.
42 Eduard Habich.
43 The stage play, Cavalcade, about contemporary British history, was