Collected Letters Volume Two: Books, Broadcasts and War, 1931–1949. Walter Hooper. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Walter Hooper
Издательство: HarperCollins
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Жанр произведения: Биографии и Мемуары
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9780007332663
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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.’

       TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS (W):

      The Kilns,

      Headington Quarry,

      Oxford.

      Jan 8th 1936

      My dear Griffiths,

      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