Additional Editorial Notes
The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was created. To locate a specific entry, please use your e-book reader’s search tools.
. George Herbert, The Elixir, 9–12.
. By John Skelton.
. By Thomas Dekker.
. An Old High German lay sometimes spelt Hildebrandslied or Hildebrand.
. Lewis’s fullest and most interesting discussion of the Jungian archetypes is found in his essay ‘Psycho-analysis and Literary Criticism’, Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association, XXVII (1942), pp. 7–21.
. Laʒamon’s Brut is extant in two manuscripts, Cotton Caligula A ix and Cotton Otho C xiii, both of which are printed in Madden’s edition. Lewis is following Cotton Caligula A ix and writes two half-lines as one. Lewis, obviously, wanted the text to be as readable as possible and, besides departing from a few scribal conventions (such as expanding the contractions), supplies his own punctuation of the text. Because of this, I have followed the present-day usage of beginning each new sentence with a capital letter.
. This word added by Lewis.
. Lewis is here correcting Madden’s edition, which reads al se cunes.
. Wilson’s edition contains three separate texts of Sawles Warde, MSS Bodley 34, Royal and Cotton. Lewis’s references are to MS Bodley 34. Printed in this same volume are the corresponding chapters (XIII, XIV, XV) of Hugo of St Victor’s De Anima. The entire De Anima is found in Migne’s Patrologia Latina (1854), vol. 177.
. Laʒamon, 15774–9 (Madden’s edition).
. Guillaume Deguileville, Pèlerinage de l’Homme. In Lydgate’s trans. (E.E.T.S., Extra Series LXXVII, ed. F. J. Furnivall, 1899), 3415 seq.
. De Gen. Animalium, 778a; Polit. 1255b.
. Metaphysics, 1072b; cf. Paradiso, XXVIII, 41–2.
. Giacomo Leopardi, ‘L’Infinito’, Canti, ed. Giuseppe de Robertis (Firenze, 1960), p. 124, l. 15.
. Il Penseroso, 69–70.
. Metaphysics, 1072b.
. ‘The silence of those eternal spaces frightens me’ is a translation of Pascal’s pensée: ‘Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m’effraie’: Brunschvicg No. 206 (II, p. 127).
The indirect quotation, ‘that though we are small and transitory as dew-drops, still we are dew-drops that can think’, does, I feel, require a comment. Lewis has confused (or is it an inspired misreading?) Pascal’s original roseau (reed) with rosée (dew). Although Pascal really compares man to a reed, I feel that I should preserve what Lewis wrote. This is because his image of the ‘dew-drop’ strikes me as the superior image, and it quite obviously serves his purpose best. The complete text of the pensée to which he is referring is: ‘L’homme n’est qu’un roseau, le plus faible de la nature; mais c’est un roseau pensant. Il ne faut pas que l’univers entier s’arme pour l’écraser: une vapeur, une goutte d’eau, suffit pour le tuer. Mais, quand l’univers l’écraserait, l’homme serait encore plus noble que ce qui le tue, parce qu’il sait qu’il meurt, et l’avantage que l’univers a sur lui; l’univers n’en sait rien. Toute notre dignité consiste donc en la pensée. C’est de là qu’il faut nous relever et non de l’espace et de la durée, que nous ne saurions remplir. Travaillons donc à bien penser: voilà le principe de la morale’: Brunschvicg No. 347 (II, pp. 261–3).
. Comus, 976–8.
. Cf. C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (Oxford, 1943), chapter III, p. 52, especially: ‘The fact that the scientist has succeeded where the magician failed has put such a wide contrast between them in popular thought that the real story of the birth of Science is misunderstood. You will even find people who write about the sixteenth century as if Magic were a medieval survival and Science the new thing that came in to sweep it away. Those who have studied the period know better. There was very little magic in the Middle Ages: the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are the high noon of magic. The serious magical endeavour and the serious scientific endeavour are twins: one was sickly and died, the other strong and throve. But they were twins. They were born of the same impulse. I allow that some (certainly not all) of the early scientists were actuated by a pure love of knowledge. But if we consider the temper of that age as a whole we can discern the impulse of which I speak. There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the “wisdom” of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men.’
. The Extasie, 57–8.
. Sancti Dionysii . . . opera omnia . . . studio Petri Lanselli . . . Lutetiae Parisiorum (MDCXV).
. De Caelo, 279a.
. William Kinglake, ‘The Troad’, Eōthen, or Traces of Travel Brought Home from the East (London, 1844), p. 58.
. ‘Milton’, The Edinburgh Review, XLII (August 1825), p. 316.
. ‘Light’, Symbolism and Belief (London, 1938), pp. 125–50.
. Shakespeare’s Imagery and What it Tells us (Cambridge, 1935).
. Lewis was quoting from memory. Patmore says in The Wedding Sermon, X, 87–9:
Spirit is heavy nature’s wing,
And is not rightly anything
Without its burthen, etc.
. The Faerie Queene, I, i, 6.
. Lewis wrote an article on Sir Ector’s lament in which he says ‘The ideal embodied in Launcelot is “escapism” in a sense never dreamed of by those who use that word; it offers the only possible escape from a world divided between wolves who do not understand, and sheep who cannot defend, the things which make life desirable’. ‘Notes on the Way’, Time and Tide, XXI (17 August 1940), p. 841.
. Paradise Regained, II, 359–60.
. For Lewis’s own criticism of Taliessin through Logres and The Region of the Summer Stars, see Arthurian Torso: Containing the Posthumous Fragment of ‘The Figure of Arthur’ by Charles Williams and a Commentary on the Arthurian Poems of Charles Williams by C. S. Lewis (1948); see also Lewis’s reviews of Taliessin through Logres in Theology, XXXVIII (April 1939), pp. 268–76, and The Oxford Magazine, LXIV (14 March 1946), pp. 248–50.
. See also Lewis’s essay on ‘The English Prose Morte’ in Essays on Malory, ed. J. A. W. Bennett (Oxford, 1963), pp. 7–28. In this essay Lewis expands some of the paradoxes—touched on in ‘The Morte Darthur’ of this volume—which, as he says, ‘have been thrown up by the remarkable discoveries made in the last fifty years about Malory and the book (or books) which he translated, with modifications, from the French and which Caxton printed in 1485’. ‘The English Prose Morte’ is followed, in the same volume, by ‘On Art and Nature: A letter to C. S. Lewis’ by Professor Vinaver.
. Gabriel Harvey’s Marginalia, ed. G. C. Moore Smith (Shakespeare Head Press, Stratford-upon-Avon, 1913), p. 168.
. In A Preface, or rather a Brief Apologie of Poetrie prefixed to the translation of Orlando Furioso in English Heroical Verse (1591).
. Sir William Davenant in his preface to Gondibert (1650).
. All the quotations from Thomas Rymer come from his preface to the translation of R. Rapin’s Reflections on Aristotle’s Treatise of Poesie (1674).
. In his dedication to King Arthur: or, the British Worthy. A dramatick Opera (1691), Dryden speaks of ‘that Fairy kind of writing, which depends only upon the Force of Imagination’. It may be that Addison is misquoting Dryden when, in The Spectator (1 July 1712), no. 419, he says ‘This Mr Dryden calls the Fairy Way of Writing’.
. Vernon Lee (pseudonym for Violet Paget), ‘The School of Boiardo’, Euphorion: Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the Renaissance, 11 (London, 1884), p. 113.
. Professor J. R. R. Tolkien’s Andrew Lang Lecture was delivered at St Andrews in 1940. It was expanded and published under the title ‘On Fairy-Stories’ in Essays Presented to Charles Williams (Oxford, 1947). Lewis is thinking of a passage in ‘On Fairy-Stories’ in which Professor Tolkien says (p. 79): ‘It is part of the essential malady of such days—producing the desire to escape, not indeed from life, but from our present time and self-made misery—that we are acutely conscious both of the ugliness of our works, and of their evil. So that to us evil and ugliness seem indissolubly allied. We find it difficult to conceive of evil and beauty together. The fear of the beautiful fay that ran through the elder ages almost eludes our grasp. Even more alarming: goodness is itself bereft of its proper beauty. In Faerie one can indeed conceive of an ogre who possesses a castle hideous as a nightmare (for the evil of the ogre wills it so), but one cannot conceive of a house built with a good purpose—an inn, a hostel for travellers, the hall of a virtuous and noble king—that is yet sickeningly ugly. At the present day it would be rash to hope to see one that was not—unless it was built before our time.’
. Gerusalemme Liberata, XVI, ix, 7–8.
. ‘Milton and Poussin’, Seventeenth Century Studies Presented to Sir Herbert Grierson (Oxford, 1938), p. 195.
. Paradise Lost, I, 16.
. Orlando Furioso, I, ii, 2.
. Josephine Waters Bennett, ‘Spenser’s Garden of Adonis’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, XLVII (1932), pp. 46–80.
. For Lewis’s other studies in Spenser see: ‘Spenser’s Irish Experiences and The Faerie Queene’, The Review of English Studies, VII (Jan. 1931), pp. 83–5; chapter VII, ‘The Faerie Queene’, in The Allegory of Love (Oxford, 1936), pp. 297–360; Book III, chapter I, ‘Sidney and Spenser’, in English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, excluding Drama, The Completion of ‘The Clark Lectures’, Trinity College, Cambridge, 1944 (The Oxford History of English Literature, vol. III; Oxford, 1954), pp. 318–93.
. Thomas Warton, Observations on the ‘Faerie Queene’ of Spenser (London, 1754), section III, pp. 57–60.
. After comparing Lewis’s quotations from William Aldis Wright’s facsimile of the Trinity MS, I have needed to correct a number of scribal errors which appeared in the original issue of this essay.
. Cf. C. S. Lewis, ‘Above the Smoke and Stir’, The Times Literary Supplement (14 July 1945), p. 331; B. A. Wright, ibid. (4 August 1945), p. 367; C. S. Lewis, ibid. (29 September 1945), p. 463; B. A. Wright, ibid. (27 October 1945), p. 511.