No, no, I never meant that Sibelius had the tonic quality of Beethoven. Do you remember our once talking about B. and Wagner & agreeing that B. was Olympian, W. titanic—B spiritual, W. natural? Well Sibelius is definitely like W. not like B. in that respect. He is not noble like Beethoven: he is inarticulate, intimate, enthralling, and close to one, like Nature itself. Very, very Northern: he makes me think of birch forests & moss and salt-marshes and cranes and gulls. I mean the symphonies. You needn’t be busied for music while you have a gramophone. Set aside a portion of your money for buying big works (symphonies etc): never play them except in their entirety—but perhaps I’ve given you all this good advice before.
I never finished Gape Row. But the descriptions of our own walks & hills were v. interesting. I thinkk yourr neww methodd of sspellingg bby ddoubbllingg alll cconnssonnanntts ssavvess a ggreatt ddeall off ttroubblle!
Please give my love to Mrs Greeves and remember me to all our friends.
Yours,
Jack
When I said you had vetoed the idea of regular correspondence, I meant that you had vetoed the idea of your taking part in it. I didn’t mean you had actually forbidden me to write to you!!
1 Nygren, Agape and Eros.
2 Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1072b.
3 Lewis went on considering the relation of Agape and Eros for years, and in The Four loves (London, 1960; Fount, 1998) he discusses them under the names ‘gift-love’ and ‘need-love’ (using ‘Eros’ to mean sexual love).
4 In Spens, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, pp. 57–9.
5 Spenser, The Faerie Queene. II, xii, 46–9.
6 ibid., II, xii, 48.
7 i.e. the waste paper basket,
8 Barfield, Harwood and Lewis planned a walking-tour for April 1936, but at the last minute Lewis was unable to go. As a joke Barfield and Harwood decided Lewis must sit for a re-examination—based on the old School Certificate—before he could be readmitted to their ‘College of Cretaceous Perambulators’. The questions and answers were published as Owen Barfield and C. S. Lewis, A Cretaceous Perambulator (The Re-examination of) ed. Waller Hooper (Oxford: The Oxford University C. S. Lewis Society, 1983, limited to 100 copies). One of the questions was ‘Give the (long) semantic history of the word “Guiting”.’ Lewis did not attempt this question, but the editor supplied the following explanation (p. 14): ‘The semantic history of the word “Guiting” is, that it became for the perambulators a convenient expletive for anything they didn’t like. A “guiter” was, for instance, a bad person. It may have been suggested by the inconveniences caused them on the 1928 walk when they passed the villages of Temple Guiting and Guiting Power in Gloucestershire.’
9 This was probably one of Barfield’s poems. It has not been published.
10 The Pilgrim’s Regress.
11 i.e. Lieutenant-Colonel Arthur Alan Hanbury-Sparrow, author of The Land-Locked Lake.
12 Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886).
13 ‘catharsis’.
14 Lewis was probably referring to his essay ‘The Personal Heresy in Criticism’ in which he argued that the ‘concealed major premise’ in E. M. W. Tillyard’s Milton (1930) was ‘plainly the proposition that all poetry is about the poet’s state of mind’. ‘The Personal Heresy in Criticism’ was eventually published in Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association, XIX (1934). It then became the first chapter of a joint work between Lewis and Tïllyard, The Personal Heresy. A Controversy, published in 1939.
15 In November 1930 Lewis sent ‘The Personal Heresy in Criticism’ to The Criterion, an influential literary periodical edited by T, S. Eliot. Six months later, in May 1931. Eliot turned it down. Lewis wrote to Eliot again on 2 June 1931 with the proposal that Eliot publish not only ‘The Personal Heresy in Criticism’ but four other essays. It is proposed to publish that important letter, not included in CL I, in the Addendum to CL III. See Thomas Steams Eliot in the Biographical Appendix.
16 Paul Elmer More, Platonism (1931).
17 Bernard Bosanquet (1848–1923), Fellow of Philosophy at University College, Oxford, 1870–81, whose works include Knowledge and Reality (1885) and A History of Aesthetic (1892).
18 Richard Dacre Archer-Hind (1849–1910), Greek scholar and Platonist, who was a Fellow of Trinity College. Cambridge. He published editions of Plato’s Phaedo (1883) and Timaeus (1888).
19 ‘Assidet Boetius stupens de hac lite’- ‘Boethius sits nearby bewildered by this dispute,’
20 In the end Lewis and Barfield, who met at Rudyard, Derbyshire, were the only ones on this Easter walk which began on 8 April.
21 This suggests that Barfield, even if he had not written any part of his poetic drama, Orpheus, was thinking and talking about it. See Lewis’s criticism of the finished work in his letter to Barfield of 28 March 1938.
22 Lewis was one of the examiners for the Newdigate Prize. This annual prize for English verse, founded in 1806 by Sir Roger Newdigate, is the most widely known of university prizes.