Quotations
and Allusions in
C.
S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy
compiled by Arend Smilde
(Utrecht, The Netherlands)
C. S. Lewis’s autobiography Surprised by Joy
(1955), like most of his books, contains a great number of allusions to
unspecified sources, including literal quotations. It is perhaps never vitally
important to know these sources; yet tracing them can be a rewarding
enterprise. Here is a listing by chapter of many such words and phrases with
brief references to what I have found to be their sources and, occasionally,
notes suggesting their relevance to the context in which Lewis uses them. I
have also included a few other items where a short explanation may be of use to
some readers. The list has its origin in the notes I added to
my Dutch translation of the book, published in 1998 as Verrast door Vreugde. Double question marks in bold type – ?? – follow
items where I have not found the required information. Corrections and additions, including
proposed new entries, are welcome.
This website also features an INDEX
of writers and writings quoted in Surprised by Joy. The
Index contains additional information in the form of dates for most of the items, including those not dealt with in the
notes below. For example, “Bekker’s Charicles”
in chapter IV of Surprised by Joy is not in the notes, but is briefly
identified (and Bekker’s name
corrected to Becker) in the Index.
Motto
Surprised by joy – impatient as the wind : Wordsworth, “Surprised by joy” (Sonnet, 1815).
Chapter
I: The First Years
Happy, but for so happy ill secured : Milton, Paradise Lost IV,
370.
Neither had ever listened for the horns of elfland : From Tennyson’s poem, “The splendour falls on castle walls” etc. in The Princess (1847), between parts
III and IV. “O sweet
and far from cliff and scar / The horns of Elfland faintly blowing!” Cf. what Lewis wrote in a letter of 25 March 1933 to his friend Arthur
Greeves about a recent talk with J. R. R. Tolkien, “We agreed that
for what we meant by romance there must be at least the hint of another
world – one must ‘hear the horns of elfland’.” Collected
Letters vol. II (2004), p. 103.
Down : County
in Northern Ireland, immediately south of Belfast.
the Blue Flower : A symbol of romantic longing in the novel Heinrich von
Ofterdingen (1802), by Novalis.
Prayer Book : The Book of Common Prayer, service book of the Anglican
Church. Large parts of it were written by Thomas Cranmer (1489–1556). By 1662
it had the form in which it was to survive for more than three centuries.
What more felicity can fall to creature... : Spenser, “Muiopotmos”, 209–210, in Complaints
(1591).
dark backward and abysm of time : Shakespeare, The Tempest
I.2, 49.
Tenniel : Sir
John Tenniel (1820–1914), cartoonist in the satirical magazine Punch and
illustrator of Alice in Wonderland.
there suddenly arose in me without warning... : According
to Dorothee Sölle in her Mystik und Widerstand (1997, translated as The
Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance, 2001) Lewis is here quoting or
alluding to the 14th-century anonymous mystical work The Cloud of Unknowing,
chapter IV. It is impossible to be sure whether this is indeed a case of
quotation or allusion, but there is an undeniable relevance of the Cloud
passage to what Lewis says here.
enormous bliss : Milton, Paradise
Lost V, 297. “...for Nature here / Wantoned as in her
prime, and played at will / Her virgin fancies, pouring forth more sweet, /
Wild above rule or art, enormous bliss.”
’Іοϋλίαν
ποθω / Oh, I desire too much : ?? The phrase really consists of three words and may
be transcribed as Iou, lian potho (“Oh, / too much / I desire”)
I heard a voice... : Longfellow, “Tegnér’s Drapa”, in The Seaside and the
Fireside (1849). Lewis is quoting the first half of the stanza. The second
half runs: “And
through the misty air / Passed like the mournful cry / Of sunward sailing
cranes.” The poem
is not a translation in blank verse, as Lewis says it is, but original
work by Longfellow, viz. a lament (drapa) in Old Norse style on the
death of the Swedish poet Esaias Tegnér.
Chapter
II: Concentration Camp
Kalevala : Finnish national epic, compiled from folk poetry by Elias
Lönnroth in the years 1835–1849.
“Green Hertfordshire”, Lamb calls it : Charles Lamb (1775–1834), “Amicus Redivivus”, seventh paragraph,
in Last Essays of Elia (1833). Lamb was born and raised in London, but
he and his sister spent many holidays with their grandmother at Blakesware, a
large country house in Hertfordshire which he fondly remembered and described
in later years.
Which like to rich and various gems inlaid... : Milton, Comus
(1634), 22–23. “...the sea-girt isles / That, like to rich and various gems,
inlay / The unadorned bosom of the deep...”
“to treat of the good that I found there” : Dante, Inferno I, 8.
“...ma per
trattar del ben ch’i’ vi trovai...”
“the slow maturing of old jokes” : G. K. Chesterton, George
Bernard Shaw (1910), in the long last section called “The Philosopher” (at about one
quarter the length of that section from its beginning; penultimate sentence of
the paragraph starting “Now the reason why our fathers did not make
marriage...”):
All the things that make monogamy a success are
in their nature undramatic things, the silent growth of an instinctive
confidence, the common wounds and victories, the accumulation of customs, the
rich maturing of old jokes.
Dr Grimstone’s school in Vice Versa : A famous school story published in
1882, Vice Versa: A Lesson to Fathers by F. Anstey tells about a
father who is magically transformed into his son and vice versa, so that the
father experiences the harsh and sordid reality of school life.
to be stayed with flagons and comforted with apples... : Song of Songs
2:5.
Martialis, “This case, I beg...” : From Epigrammata VI.19.
Garuda Stone : See note on F. Anstey’s Vice Versa, above. The
Garuda Stone is the magical device by which father and son swap roles.
Chapter
III: Mountbracken and Campbell
For all these fair people, etc. : Free rendering of lines 48–55 of Sir
Gawain and the Green Knight, a late 14th-century anonymus poem. The
original passage starts with the words “with all the wele of the worlde”. In
chapter XIV (see note there) this phrase appears to have been partly confused
with another passage from Sir Gawain.
a Fabian : Fabianism was an English variety of democratic socialism
during the latter decades of the nineteenth century.
Thomas Arnold : English historian and educational reformer (1795–1842).
ogni parte ad ogni parte splende : “Each
part [viz. each of the nine angelic choirs] emitting its radiance to each other
part [viz. each of the nine celestial spheres]” Dante, Inferno VII, 75.
Chapter
IV: I Broaden my Mind
I struck the board... : George Herbert, “The Collar” (from The
Temple, 1633).
In January 1911, just turned thirteen : Born on 29 November 1898, he had in
fact just turned twelve.
Tamburlaine the Great : Tragedy in blank verse by
Christopher Marlowe (first published 1590) on the life, conquests, and death of
the 14th-century Mongol conqueror Timur the Lame, or Timurlane.
Browning’s Paracelsus : Dramatic poem by the English poet Robert Browning (first
published 1835) based on the life of the Swiss doctor, alchemist and philosopher
Paracelsus (1493-1541). He has an obsessive lust for knowledge; although he is
aware of the importance of love, he does not discover the true and fruitful
relationship between love and knowledge until he dies.
Hippodrome : Originally denoting an open-air court for horse and chariot
races in ancient Greece and Rome, the English word has come to cover a variety
of popular entertainments. The Royal Hippodrome (or “New Vic”) was a Belfast
theatre built in 1907 and demolished in 1996. Lewis also mentions the Empire
Theatre of Varieties, which lasted from 1894 till 1965.
I believe... One does feel : Ronald Knox, Absolute and
Abitofhell (1913). “When suave politeness, tempering bigot zeal / Corrected I believe to
One does feel.”
prattler : George Herbert, “Conscience” (from The Temple, 1633).
“Peace, pratler,
do not lowre: / Not a fair Look, but thou dost call it foul: / Not a sweet
dish, but thou dost call it sowre: / Musick to thee doth howl. / By listning to
thy chatting fears / I have both lost mine eyes and eares...”
by maistry : Walter Hilton, The Scale of Perfection I.33. “...lift up thine heart to God
acknowledging thy wretchedness, and cry mercy with a good trust of forgiveness.
And strive no more therewith, nor hang no longer thereupon, as thou wouldest by
mastery not feel such wretchednesses.” (ed. Evelyn Underhill 1923.)
Lucretius : De rerum natura II, 180.
knut : obsolete
word for dandy.
“looked upon to lust after her” : Matthew 5:28
Chapter
V: Renaissance
Traherne : Thomas
Traherne (1637–1674), Anglican divine; author of Centuries of Meditations,
first published in 1908. Each of the five chapters in this book contain one
hundred meditations and are therefore called “Centuries”. The present quotation
is from the first Century’s second medtiation.
as the poet says, “The sky had turned round” : Charles Williams, “Palomides before
his christening”, 77, from Taliessin through Logres (1938).
the sunward-sailing cranes : See note to I heard a voice... in
chapter I.
the whole Ring : Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung), a cycle of
four operas by Richard Wagner: Das Rheingold (1854), Die Walküre
(1856), Siegfried (1857) and Götterdämmerung (1874).
Descend to earth, descend, celestial Nine... : This poem in so far as it has
survived (792 lines of it) has been published, along with much more otherwise
unpublished poetry, by Don W. King in his book C. S. Lewis, Poet: The Legacy of His Poetic Impulse (Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio, 2001).
The present poem appears as the first item
in Appendix One.
Clovelly : A
picturesque fishing village in Cornwall, in the South-West of England.
John Betjeman : English
poet (1906–1984); he was a pupil of C. S. Lewis’s at Magdalen College,
Oxford, during the years 1926–1927.
the Seventh Benjamin (a rabbit, as you will have guessed) : An allusion to
Beatrix Potter’s Benjamin Bunny (1904).
Chapter
VI: Bloodery
Any way for Heaven sake... : John Webster (English dramatist, c.
1580–1634), The Duchess of Malfi, IV.2. The words quoted are spoken by
the Duchess to her murderers shortly before they kill her.
Park Lane : Street
near Hyde Park, where traditionally the richest people in London live.
Chesterfield... Stanhope : Lord Chesterfield (1694–1773) wrote
the Letters to his Son, Philip Stanhope (1774) to help this (natural)
son to avoid the mistakes which Chesterfield had himself made in the course of
his life.
As common as a barber’s chair : perhaps an allusion to Shakespeare,
All’s well that ends well II.2, 18. “It is like a barber’s chair, that fits all
buttocks.”
the Marconi period : Guglielmo Marconi (1874–1937), inventor of radio telegraphy
and Nobel laureate for Physics 1909. He worked mostly in England. In 1912 the
Marcony Company secured a big order from the British government. A scandal
followed when it appeared that several ministers, including the Prime Minster
Lloyd George, owned shares in this company. See G. K. Chesterton’s Autobiography
(1936), chapter IX, “The case against corruption”.
Chapter
VII: Light and Shade
Goldsmith : Oliver Goldsmith (1731–1774), English novelist. The
quotation is from his best-known novel, the Vicar of Wakefield, where it
is the headline of chapter XXV.
Mr Ian Hay : John Hay Beith, alias Ian Hay (1876–1952), The
Lighter Side of School Life (1914), p. 107.
“G. B. S.” and “G. K. C.” : George Bernard
Shaw (1856–1950) and Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936). Lewis is referring
to The Lighter Side of School Life, a series of pen-pictures by the
witty and popular novelist Ian Hay (John Hay Beith, 1876–1952). Chapter 4 of
that book is on “Boys”, i.e. schoolboys, in two sections, “The Government” and
“The Opposition”. The latter section has the following episode (pp. 106–107):
...Then comes the
Super-Intellectual – the ‘Highbrow.’ He is a fish out of the water with a vengence, but he does
exist at school –
somehow. He congregates in places of refuge with other of the faith; and they
discuss the English Review, an mysterious individuals who are only
referred to by their initials – as G. B. S. and G. K. C. Sometimes he initiates
these discussions because they really interest him, but more often, it is to be
feared, because they make him feel superior and grown-up. Somewhere in the
school grounds certain youthful schoolmates of his, inspired by precisely
similar motives but with different mtehods of procedure, are stitting in the
centre of a rhododendron bush smokin cigarettes. In each case the idea is the
same – namely, a hankering after meats which are not for babes. But the smoker
puts on no side about his achievements, whereas the ‘highbrow’ does. (...) Intellectual snobbery is a rare thing among boys,
and therefore difficult to account for.
enormous bliss : See note to chapter I.
As Aristotle remarked, men do not become dictators to become warm : Aristotle, Politics
II.7 (1267a, 15), “...the greatest crimes are caused by excess and not by
necessity. Men do not become tyrants in order that they may not suffer cold;
and hence great is the honor bestowed, not on him who kills a thief, but on him
who kills a tyrant.”
“beyond expectation, beyond hope” : Boswell, Life of Johnson, 4
June 1781. Johnson during a visit to Luton-Hoe “to see Lord Bute’s magnificent seat” –
The library is very splendid;
the dignity of the rooms is very great; and the quantity of pictures is beyond
expectation, beyond hope.
Thrones, dominations... : Milton, Paradise Lost V,
601.
He nevere yet... : Chaucer,
Canterbury Tales, Prologue, 70 (description of the Knight).
a delicacy,
to lack which argued “a gross and swainish disposition” : Freely quoted from John Milton, An Apology for Smectymnuus
(1642), I –
“Nor blame it, readers, in those years to propose
to themselves such a reward, as the noblest dispositions above other things in
this life have sometimes preferred: whereof not to be sensible when good and
fair in one person meet, argues both a gross and shallow judgment, and withal
an ungentle and swainish breast.” (from the introductory section).
Lewis also quotes this, again freely, in his chapter on Sidney and Spenser in English Literature in the
Sixteenth Century, II/1, p. 339:
“We can hardly doubt that it [Sidney’s Arcadia] was among the
lofty romances which Milton acknowledged as his textbooks of love and chastity,
replete with those beauties whereof ‘not to be sensible argues a gross and swainish disposition’.”
Oh the brave music... : Edward
Fitzgerald, The Rubáiyát of ‘Omar Khayyám (1859), 12.
Corpus Poeticum Boreale : edited by Gudbrand Vigfusson &
F. York Powell, published in two volumes, Oxford 1883. Subtitle: The Poetry
of the Old Northern Tongue from the earliest times to the nineteenth century.
I: Eddic Poetry; II: Court Poetry.
Asgard
: Abode (“god-garden”) of the Aesir, i.e. the gods of
Germanic mythology such as Odin, Thor and Loki.
Cruachan
: Capital of the old Irish province of Connacht.
the Red Branch : A
fortified palace in Tara (north of
Dublin), abode of the ancient Irish kings; also an order of knights who
had the right to live there.
Tir-nan-Og : Tír na nOc, “Land of Youth”, was one of the regions of the
other world where the dispossessed gods in ancient Irish mythology might go
after leaving Ireland. Anyone returning from there to the world of mortals
found that either much more or much less time had passed there than in the
other world.
Cuchulain, Finn : Hero figures with supernatural powers in Celtic mythology;
principal figures in the Ulster Cycle and the Fenian (or Ossianic) Cycle
respectively. Cú Chulainn, or “hound of Culann”, was called after the dog whose killing was the first
feat in his short and violent life as defender of Ulster. He was especially
feared and famous for his battle-frenzy, and he was invincible, but not
invulnerable. Finn, or Fionn mac Cumhaill (also Finn MacCool or Fingal), was
the father of the bard Ossian.
Loki replied, “I pay respect to wisdom not to strength” :
Fragments from Lewis’s early work “Loki Bound” have survived and were
published by Don W. King in 2001 (see
note to Descend to earth etc. in chapter V, above, ). The “Loki”
fragments appear as the second item in Appendix One – and do not contain the present line.
Chapter
VIII: Release
Pearl : An anonymous late-14th-century
poem on a father’s grief at the death
of his infant daughter. The lines quoted, “As
Fortune is wont, at her chosen hour,”
etc., are 129–132.
leprechauns : A
type of dwarf in Irish fairy tales.
Mahaffy : John
Pentland Mahaffy (1839–1919), Professor of Ancient History at Trinity College,
Dublin, where he was Provost from 1914 onwards.
Jowett : Benjamin
Jowett (1817–1893), Regius Professor of Greek at Balliol College, Oxford, where
he was Master from 1870 onwards. See note to The Master of Balliol in
chapter IX.
Sandhurst : Location
of the Royal Military Academy.
as the proverb has it, like an ass to the harp : See Erasmus, Adagium 335 (asinvs ad lyram).
Chapter
IX: The Great Knock
Lord Chesterfield : See
note to chapter VI. The quotation (inaccurate) is from Chesterfield's letter
dated at Bath, October 19, 1748.
The Master of Balliol : Very probably Jowett (see note to
chapter VIII, above). He was an influential figure in Oxford during the latter
decades of the nineteenth century as many other colleges came to be headed by
Balliol graduates.
ful drery was hire chere : Chaucer, Canterbury Tales,
The Clerk’s Tale, 458. “Al drery was his cheere and his lookyng.”
McCabe : Joseph
Martin McCabe (1867–1955) left the Franciscan Order and the Roman Catholic
Church in 1896; for the rest of his life he was a militant rationalist and
freethinker and a prolific writer. He had just died at the time when Surprised
by Joy was published.
The Golden Bough : A thirteen-volume work on religious anthropology by J. G.
Frazer, published in 1890–1915.
“settled, calm, Epicurean life” : Tennyson, “Lucretius” (1868), 215.
“Nothing
to mar the sober majesties / Of settled, sweet Epicurean life.”
wise-wife : witch,
sorceress.
“eucatastrophe” (as Professor Tolkien would call it) : J. R. R. Tolkien
coined this word to denote a modified form of Happy Ending, as as a distinctive
feature of fairy-stories. See “On Fairy-Stories”, his Andrew Lang Lecture at
the University of St Andrews in March 1939, first published in 1947, then in
1964, and lastly in 1983 in a volume of his essays called The Monsters and
the Critics. In the fourth paragraph from the end of the section called
“Recovery, Escape, Consolation” (p. 153 in the 1983 edition) Tolkien says –
... At
least I would say that Tragedy is the true form of Drama, its highest function;
but the opposite is true of Fairy-story. Since we do not appear to possess a
word that expresses this opposite – I will call it Eucatastrophe. The eucatastrophic
tale is the true form of fairy-tale, and its highest function.
The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more
correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous “turn” (for there is no
true end to any fairy-tale): this joy, which is one of the things which
faire-stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially escapist,
nor “fugitive”. In its fairy-tale – or otherworld – setting, it is a sudden and
miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the
existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of
these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much
evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium,
giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant
as grief.
Charlotte M. Yonge : English
novelist (1823–1901), much in favour with the Oxford Movement. She was a Sunday
school teacher all her life.
Pylos : Residence
of King Nestor in Homer’s Odyssey. In Book III Telemachus, starting his
quest for his father Odysseus, is kindly received at the aged king’s court but
gets no useful information. Since excavations in the mid-20th century, ancient
“sandy Pylos”, as Homer often calls it, is believed to have been the location
of present-day Pylos-Navarino, on the southern west coast of the
Peleponnese.
Sir Maurice Powicke : Frederick Maurice Powicke (1897-1963), medieval
historian, Regius Professor of History at Oxford from 1929. His many works
include a volume the 13th century in the Oxford History of England, published
in 1953. Location of the saying about “civilised people in all ages” unknown. – ??
My debt to him is very great : In
his earlier book Miracles (1947),
chapter X, Lewis refers to Kirkpatrick as
The very man who
taught me to think – a hard, satirical atheist (ex-Presbyterian) who doted on
the Golden Bough and filled his house
with the products of the Rationalist Press Association ... and he was a man as
honest as the daylight, to whom I here willingly acknowledge an immense debt.
His attitude to Christianity was for me the starting point of adult thinking;
you may say it is bred in my bones. And yet, since those days, I have come to
regard that attitude as a total misunderstanding.
Chapter X: Fortune’s Smile
The fields, the floods... : Spenser, The Faerie Queene
I.ix.12, 8–9.
R.A.S.C. : Royal Army Service Corps.
Formed in 1888 as Army Service Corps, it was not called Royal until 1918. Its job
was to deliver all supplies including petrol, food and ammunition up to the
front line. In 1965 this branch of the British army was reorganized and renamed
as Royal Corps of Transport.
Inceptus clamor... : “The
cry rising in the gaping mouth is muffled”. Vergil, Aeneid VI, 493.
Plymouth Brothers : Properly called Plymouth Brethren, of briefly “the
Brethren”, this religious sect or
movement without organized ministry was founded around 1827 in Dublin.
It was Puritanical in outlook and prohibited many secular occupations for its
members. Its first meeting on English soil was established in Plymouth in 1831,
The movement then soon spread throughout the U.K. and, in time, all over the
world. Adherents are sometimes designated as “Darbyites”, after evangelist John Nelson Darby, one of
the founding figures in Plymouth.
Loki Bound : See note to Descend to earth... in chapter V, above.
The Newcomes : Novel by William Makepeace
Thackeray (1811–1863), first
publisehed in 24 parts in 1853-1855 and very popular in the 19th century. The
book’s subtitle is “Memoirs of a most respectable Family”, and the name of the
principal character is Clive (C. S. Lewis’s official first name).
what Dyson calls “the ancient, bitter earth” : Hugo Dyson and John Butt, Augustans
and Romantics 1689–1839. Introductions to English
Literature, ed. Bonamy Dobrée, Vol. III (1940), pp. 90–91, about the poet William
Wordsworth:
It is a pity that the accident
of Wordsworth’s habitation and life-long preference
has made him known as a “Lake-Poet”. He is an earth poet. Not the green earth of
the pastoral poetry of Pope and Gray and Philips, but the ancient bitter earth
from which men wrest a living. The earth of Hesiod and of Piers Plowman.”
Lewis
quoted from this passage, and more from the same book, in a letter to his brother of 3 March 1940; Collected Letters vol.
II, p. 361.
Handramit and Harandra : The two main types of landscape on
the planet Malacandra (Mars) in C. S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet
(1938).
smoke and stir : Milton,
Comus, 5. “In regions
mild of calm and serene air, / Above the smoke and stir of this dim spot /
Which men call Earth...”
infinite riches ... a little room : Christopher Marlowe, The Jew of
Malta (ca. 1592), I.1, 37. “Thus methinks should men of judgement frame /
Their means of traffic from the vulgar trade, / And, as their wealth
increaseth, so enclose / Infinite riches in a little room.”
eating and drinking my own condemnation : 1 Corinthians 11:29. “For he who eats and drinks
without a proper sense of the Body, eats and drinks to his own condemnation” (Moffatt translation).
the Authorized Version : Standard English translation of the
Bible, dating from 1611; King James Bible is (or was) the usual American
name for this translation.
The Syrian captain ... the house of Rimmon : See II Kings 5:18.
Chapter
XI: Check
When bale is at highest... : “Sir Aldingar” is a medieval
ballad, included in Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry
(1765).
Edda : Two Icelandic books,
containing between them most of what is now known about Norse mythology, are
each called Edda. The Prose Edda is an early-13th-century Icelandic work
by Snorri Sturluson and hence is also called Snorri Edda; intended as a
handbook for poets, it is a treasure trove of prose retellings and verse
quotations of much ancient mythological lore. The Poetic or Elder
Edda is a 13th-century manuscript (discovered in 1643) containing poems on
gods and heroes probably dating from various points in time between the ninth
and eleventh centuries.
Saga : A saga is an Old Norse
semi-fictional historical narrative, often telling about events in the period
roughly around the year 1000, and written down in the 13th century after a long
oral tradition.
the Ash : Yggdrasill, the “world tree” in Norse mythology. According to
modern interpretations this immense tree was not originally conceived to be an
ash tree but a taxus.
“I should know most and should least enjoy” : Robert Browning
(1812–1889), “Cleon”, 317; the poem was published in Men and Women
(1855). In Browning, the relation between knowing most and enjoying least seems
to be biographical rather than psychological –
While every day my hairs fall
more and more,
My hand shakes, and the heavy yeas increase –
The horror quickening still from year to year,
The consummation coming past escape
When I shall know most, and yet least enjoy –
When all my works wherein I prove my worth,
Being present still to mock me in men's mouths,
Alive still, in the praise of such as thou,
I, I the feeling, thinking, acting man,
The man who loved his life so over-much,
Sleep in my urn.
the Wordsworthian predicament ... a “glory” had passed away : See Wordsworth’s
“Ode: Intimations of Immortality from recollections of early childhood” (1807),
II. “But yet I
know, where’er I go, / That there hath passed away a glory from the earth.” See also the penultimate
paragraph of Surprised by Joy (“I cannot, indeed, complain, like
Wordsworth, that the visionary gleam has passed away.”)
“Why seek ye the living...” : Luke 24:5–6.
by “maistry” : After
Walter Hilton; see note to chapter IV.
Santayana, “All that is good is imaginary...” : George Santayana (1863–1952),
Spanish-born American philosopher, poet and novelist. The location of the maxim
quoted is – ?? – unknown. A similar idea is expressed in
Santayanas memoirs: “That the real was rotten and only the imaginary at all
interesting seemed to me axiomatic” (People and Places, p. 167 according
to a quotation in the online Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy).
Tantum religio : Or, in full, Tantum Religio potuit suadere malorum. “So
much evil is made acceptable by religion.” Lucretius, De rerum natura I,
101.
Anactoria : A
poem by Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909), included in his Poems and
Ballads (1866).
the unimaginable lodge for solitary thinkings : Keats, Endymion (1818) I,
293–294.
The first touch of the earth... : Keats, Endymion IV, 614.
Unde hoc mihi? : Luke 1:43 in the Vulgate version. “Et unde hoc mihi ut veniat mater Domini mei ad me?” – It is Elisabeth’s
exclamation when Mary enters her house, both women being miraculously pregnant:
“And whence is this to me,
that the mother of my Lord should
come to me?”
Chapter
XII: Guns and Good Company
La compagnie, de tant d’hommes vous plaist... : “The company of so many noble, young, and active men
delights you; (...) the freedom of the conversation, without art; a masculine
and unceremonious way of living.” Montaigne, Essays,
III.13, “On Experience”.
“dreaming spires” : Matthew
Arnold, “Thyrsis” (1866), 19–20. “And that sweet City with her dreaming spires,
/ She needs not June for beauty’s
heightening.”
“last enchantments” : Matthew Arnold, Essays in
Criticism, First Series (1865). “Beautiful City! (...) whispering from her towers
the last enchantments of the Middle Age...”
Responsions : In
Oxford, the first of three exams to be passed for obtaining the degree of
Bachelor of Arts (B.A.).
“very heaven” : Wordsworth, French Revolution, as it appeared to
Enthusiasts at its Commencement (1809), 5; The Prelude (1850) XI,
108. “Bliss was
it in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very heaven!”
the humour which is ... (as Aristotle would say) the “bloom” on dialectic itself : Lewis appears to be
making his own use of a “bloom” image somewhere in Aristotle; but the image itself
might be his own, rather than Aristotle’s. This is suggested by the penultimate chapter of Lewis’s Letters to Malcolm, where he refers to
Aristotle’s description of delight
as the “bloom” on an unimpeded
activity; the reference is to Ethics,
1153b, but no bloom actually comes in there.
the cynic’s nose,
the odora
canum vis or bloodhound sensitivity... : The Latin words are from Vergil’s Aeneid, IV.132
and
literally mean “the
smelling power of dogs”. Vergil actually means “hunting dogs (with keen noses)”.
The Cynics were an ancient Greek school of philosophy originating at the
Cynosarges gymnasium just outside Athens, ca. 400 B.C. The word “cynic” seems
to stem as much from that gymnasium’s name as – directly – from Cyôn, Greek
for “dog”, since the Cynics’ way of life caused Athenians to compare them to
dogs. Meanwhile it may well be an original idea of Lewis’s to re-connect the
modern meaning of cynicism to this ancient etymology and thus to develop that
meaning – with the dog’s smelling power as the new point of comparison.
In 195 Lewis published a poem titled
‘Odora canum vis: a defence of certain modern biographers and critics’ (now in Collected Poems, 1994) poking fun at
‘disproportioned views on lust’.
Bibles laid open... fine nets and stratagems” : George Herbert, “Sin” (The
Temple, 1633).
“unexamined life” : Plato,
Apology 38a.
H.E. : High Explosive.
Cf. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters, XXXI, 4th paragraph, “the stink and taste
of high explosive on the lips...”
Chapter
XIII: The New Look
This wall I was many a weary month in finishing... : Last words of the paragraph which
begins “So that I had now a double Wall...”, almost exactly half-way Robinson
Crusoe. (This is near the end of chapter XVII in some editions, of chapter
XI in others; Defoe’s original text has no chapters.) The passage comes
a few pages after Robinson Crusoe sees “the print of a man’s naked foot on the
shore” and is “terrify’d to the last degree”. He fits the outer defence wall
around his cave with seven muskets in “frames that held them like a carriage,
that so I could fire all the seven guns in two minutes time.”
Falstaff, Sir Colville : A scene in Shakespeare’s King
Henry IV, second part, IV.3. “Do ye yield, sir, or shall I sweat for
you? .... He saw me, and yielded; that I may justly say with the hook-nos’d
fellow of Rome – I came, saw, and overcame.”
“Blighty” : A word derived from Hindi, designating England as seen from
abroad as a longed-for haven and place of plenty. Metaphorically, it may also
mean an injury which, though not really serious, is just serious enough to
compel (i.e. to justify) a return to England for recovery.
Malory : Sir
Thomas Malory (1400?–70), compiler and author of Le Morte Darthur
(1485), a prose rendering in twenty-one books of the Arthurian legends, made up
from the French versions with additions of his own.
the water-colour world of Morris : i.e. William Morris
(1834–1896), English poet, painter, socialist and general crusader against
ugliness. See also Lewis’s references to Morris
– in
chapter IX, fourth paragraph from the end (starting “But Homer came first”),
where he describes himself as “a boy soaked in William Morris”
– toward
the end of chapter X, where he describes Morris as “my great author at this
period” whose very name was “coming to have at least as potent a magic” as
Wagner’s
– in
chapter XI, par. 5 (“One thing, however...”), where “the world of Morris became
the frequent medium of Joy”.
– in
chapter XI, par. 18 (“The woodland journeyings...”), where Morris is mentioned
along with Malory, Spenser and Yeats as an author whose works had, for Lewis,
prefigured George MacDonald’s Phantastes.
For a
fuller account of what Morris meant for Lewis, see his letters to Arthur
Greeves of 1 July 1930 and 22 September 1931, in Collected Letters I
(2000), pp. 911 and 970.
Shelley in The Triumph of Life : Unfinished poem by Percy
Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822). It describes a vision of the captive multitude of
humanity, through which the triumphal chariot passes. This is the procession of
Life, the conqueror; chained to the chariot are the great men of history –
vanquished by the mystery of life. The vision is succeeded by the allegory of a
single life which, after a hopeful and aspiring youth, falls victim to the same
mystery; love is the only armour against defeat. The vision is explained to the
poet by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. [n.b.
This note is taken almost verbatim from Michael Stapleton’s excellent Cambridge Guide to English
Literature of 1983.]
Goethe ... des Lebens goldnes Baum : From Goethe’s play Faust (1838),
toward the end of the second scene called Studierzimmer (Study);
Mephistopheles talking to the Student. “Grau, teurer Freund, ist alle Theorie /
Und grün des Lebens goldner Baum.” – “Grey is, dear friend, all theory / And
green the golden tree of life.” (N.B. goldnes is a slight misquotation
of goldner.)
Barfield of Wadham ... Harwood of The House : “Wadham” is Wadham College in
Oxford; “The House” was a nickname for Christ Church, another Oxford college.
Lewis’s own college in these years
was University College, which was also the one where Hamilton Jenkins
(mentioned in the previous paragraph) began his studies in 1919.
“stop for Fortune’s finger” : Shakespeare, Hamlet III.2,
66 – “...blest
are those / Whose blood and judgment are so well commeddled / That they are not
a pipe for Fortune’s finger / To sound what stop she pleases. Give me that man
/ That is not passion’s slave, and I will wear him / In my heart’s core, ay, in
my heart of heart, / As I do thee.”
Mods, Greats : Short
names for Classical Honour Moderations and Final Honour School,
the two parts of Literae Humaniores – a four-year course in classical Greek and Roman literature and philosophy.
an old, dirty, gabbling, tragic, Irish parson : Rev. Dr
Frederick Walker Macran (1866-1947). Several notes on conversations with him
can be found in Lewis’s published diaries of the mid-1920s, All My Road Before Me:The Diary of C. S. Lewis, 1922-1927,
edited by Walter Hooper (1991), which also has a item on “Cranny” in the
Biographical Index at the back of the book.
the very
world, which is the world / Of all of us... : Wordsworth, The
Prelude (1850) XI, 142–144.
Be not
too wildly amorous of the far... : Walter de la Mare, “The Imagination’s Pride” (The Veil and Other
Poems, 1921).
delectable
mountains : Episodes in John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress I
(1678) and II (1684).
western
garderns : Apparently a generic name for mythical and paradisal places
like Avalon and the garden of the Hesperides (see the end of this paragraph), from Arthurian and Greek
mythology respectively.
“quietly declaims the cursings of itself” : Matthew Arnold, “Empedocles
on Etna” (1852), 301.
Carlyle’s lady : cf. William James, The
Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), Lecture 2:
“I accept
the universe” is reported to have been a favorite utterance of our New England
transcendentalist, Margaret Fuller; and when some one repeated this phrase to
Thomas Carlyle, his sardonic comment is said to have been: “Gad! she’d better!”
At bottom the whole concern of both morality and religion is with the manner of
our acceptance of the universe.
The attribution to Carlyle is
doubtful. Lewis first read the passage in William James on 11 June 1922 and was
“pleased to find for the first time Carlyle’s remark about the lady”; see All My Road Before Me: The Diary of
C. S. Lewis, 1922-1927, ed. Walter Hooper (1991). Margaret Fuller
(1810-1850) was a journalist and critic associated to the American literary and
philosophical movement called Transcendentalism, which took much of its
founding inspiration from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s first book, Nature (1836).
that whole year of youth... : ??
the Jenkinian zest... : A reference to his friend A. K.
Hamilton Jenkin, mentioned in this chapter’s third paragraph. See also chapter
XV, sixth paragraph, “..my Jenkinian love of everything which has its own
strong flavour.” There are many references to Hamilton Jenkin as well as a
short biography of him in Lewis’s diary published as All My Road Before Me
(1991), and letters to him (plus, again, a short biography) in the first two
volumes of C. S. Lewis’s Collected Letters (2000, 2004).
“the fuller splendour”behind the “sensuous curtain” : From a passage in The Principles of
Logic by the English idealist philsopher Francis Bradley (1846–1924).
“That the glory of this world (...) is appearance
leaves the world more glorious, if we feel it is a show of some fuller splendour; but the sensuous curtain is a deception (...) if it
hides some colourless movement of atoms, some (...) unearthly ballet of
bloodless categories.”
The words
about “the glory of this world” are also quoted by Lewis in his earlier
autobiographical book, The Pilgrim’s Regress (1932), at the end
of chapter VII/9. I have not traced the exact location in Bradley’s book – ??
“in desire without hope” : Dante, Inferno IV, 42. “...che senza speme vivemo in
disio.”
“We give thanks to thee for thy great glory” : From
the “Gloria” in the Latin mass. “Gratias agimus tibi propter magnam gloriam
tuam”.
Chapter
XIV: Checkmate
The one principle of hell is – “I am my own” : George
MacDonald, Unspoken Sermons, Third Series, “Kingship”. This same
quotation is included as No. 203 in C. S. Lewis’s George MacDonald: An
Anthology (1946).
“freedom” and “gentillesse” : Words from the vocabulary of
Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.
laudator temporis acti : Someone who sings the praises of
the Past. Horatius, Ars poetica (Epistulae II.3), 173.
Donne’s maxim : The line quoted is not in Donne but in Shakespeare, A Midsummer
Night’s Dream II.2, 138–139 (Lysander speaking): “For, as a surfeit of the
sweetest things / The deepest loathing to the stomach brings, / Or as the
heresies that men do leave / Are hated most of those they did deceive, / So
thou, my surfeit and my heresy, / Of all be hated, but the most of me!”
Restoration Comedy : Comedies
written in the period following the Restoration of the British monarchy in
1660.
Roland’s great line : Chanson de Roland,
1015. “Paien unt tort et chrestïens unt dreit.”
the Fark : A. S. L. Farquharson (1871–1942), who taught Philosophy at
Magdalen College, Oxford.
five great Magdalen men ... Benecke ... [etc.] : The book to
read on Lewis’s academic biotope and philosophical inspiration from colleagues
in the early years of his career as a tutor is James Patrick, The Magdalen Metaphysicals: Idealism and
Orthodoxy at Oxford, 1901-1945 (Mercer University Press, 1985). The book’s
four protagonists are Clement C. J. Webb (1865-1954), John Alexander Smith
(1863-1939), R. G. Collingwood (1889-1943) and C. S. Lewis respectively, with
occasional references to Carritt, Beneke (not Benecke), Brightman and Onions.
Alanus : Alanus ab Insulis, or Alain de Lille (c.
1125–1203), French scholar, rector of the university of Paris, reputed to be a
universally learned man; author of De planctu naturae (“Nature’s
Lament”, a
satire on human vice) and Anticlaudianus.
Macrobius : Ambrosius Macrobius Theodosius (c. 500 A.D.). Latin
grammarian, author of a mathematical and astronomical commentary on Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis.
Du Cange : Charles du Fresne, seigneur du Cange
(1610–1688), French lexicographer and Byzantinologist; compiler of two major
dictionaries of Medieval Latin and Medieval Greek.
Comparetti : Domenico Comparetti (1835–1927), Italian philologist, author of Virgilio
nel Medio Evo (1872; English: Virgil in the Middle Ages, 1895).
Alexander’s Space, Time and Deity : Samuel Alexander (1859–1938), Australian-born philosopher who first
taught at Oxford and then became Professor of Philosophy in Manchester. His
earliest work was Moral Order and
Progress (1889), an exposition of evolutionary ethics which won him both a
glowing review and the life-long friendship of C. Lloyd Morgan – another pantheistically-minded
thinker in the wake of recent great developments in biology and physical
science. Alexander’s large two-volume main work Space, Time and Deity (1920) resulted
from his Gifford Lectures at the University of Glasgow in 1916–1918. In the
preface to the 1927 new edition he states that “the hypothesis of the book is
that “Space-Time is the stuff of which matter and all things are
specifications.” Lewis began reading it on 8 March 1924, as appears from his
diary for that day (published in All My Road Before Me, 1991). The
passage about Enjoyment and Contemplation is in the Introduction:
“Enjoyed” and “contemplated”
For convenience of description
I am accustomed to say the mind enjoys itself and contemplates its objects. The
act of mind is an enjoyment; the object is contemplated. If the object is
sometimes called a contemplation, that is by the same sort of usage by which ‘a
perception’ is used for a perceived object or percept as well as for an act of
perceiving. The contemplation of a contemplated object is, of course, the
enjoyment which is together with that object or is aware of it. The choice of
the word enjoyment or enjoy must be admitted not to be particularly felicitous.
It has to include suffering, or any state or process in so far as the mind
lives through it. It is undoubtedly at variance with ordinary usage, in which,
though we are said indeed to enjoy peace of mind we are also said to enjoy the
things we eat, or, in Wordsworth’s words, a flower enjoys the air it breathes,
where I should be obliged to say with the same personification of the flower
that it contemplates the air it breathes, but enjoys the breathing. Still less
do I use the word in antithesis to understanding, as in another famous passage
of the same poet, “contented if he might enjoy the things which others
understand.” Both the feeling and the understanding are in my language enjoyed.
I should gladly accept a better word if it is offered. What is of importance is
the recognition that in any experience the mind enjoys itself, and contemplates
its object or its object is contemplated, and that these two existences, the
act of mind and the object as they are in the experience, are distinct
existences united by the relation of compresence. The experience is a piece of
the world consisting of these two existences in their togetherness. The one
existence, the enjoyed, enjoys itself, or experiences itself as an enjoyment;
the other existence, the contemplated, is experienced by the enjoyed. The
enjoyed and the contemplated are together.
In the preface to the second
edition of his book (1927) Alexander spent a few more pages (xiii-xxi) on the
subject.
“with all the wo in the world” : Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
(anonymous late 14th-century poem) III.23, 1717, about a fox being hunted by a
pack of hounds. “With all
the wo on lyue / To the wod he went away.” See also note to chapter III, motto.
Dom Bede Griffiths : Alan
Griffiths (1906-1993) is the dedicatee of Surprised by Joy. His own
spiritual autobiography was published in a year earlier as The Golden String;
this book is mentioned in chapter XV, par. 8 (starting “As I have said...”). He came to Oxford in 1925 and had Lewis as
his tutor for English literature in 1927–29. On becoming a Benedictine monk in
1933, he took the name Bede, after the 8th-century English church
historian, Beda Venerabilis. “Dom” was the usual prefix for a Benedictine or
Carthusian monk’s name, derived from Latin Dominus, “Lord”.
“know of
the doctrine” : Gospel
of John, 7:16–17. “My
doctrine is not mine, but his that sent me. If any man will do his will, he
shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak of
myself.”
My name was legion : Cf.
Mark 5:10 and Luke 8:30.
that dreadful valley of Ezekiel’s : Cf. Ezekiel 37:1–14.
“I am the Lord”; “I am that I am”; “I am.” : Cf. Exodus 3:14.
That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me : Job 3:25. Lewis used the same
phrase in a very different context in his last book, Letters to Malcolm
(1964), chapter 11. Much more relevant to his experience and view of conversion
is the way this quotation from Job appears in George MacDonald’s Unspoken Sermons, Series One (1867), nr.
2, “The Consuming Fire” –
...when we say that God is
Love, do we teach men that their fear of him is groundless? No. As much as they
fear will come upon them, possibly far more. But there is something beyond
their fear, a divine fate which they cannot withstand ... The wrath will
consume what they call themselves; so that the selves God made shall
appear, coming out with tenfold consciousness of being, an bringing with them
all that made the blessedness of the life the men tried to lead without God.
They will know that now first are they fully themselves. ... The death that is
in them shall be consumed.
Lewis
included part of this same passage as nr. 7 in his George Macdonald: An Anthology (1946).
In the Trinity Term of 1929 : The year must in fact have
been 1930, as was discovered almost
simultaneously but independently by two Lewis scholars (Andrew Lazo and Alistair McGrath) in
2013. Trinity Term is the last of the three Terms in an academic year in
Oxford, covering the late spring and early summer.
compelle intrare, compel them to come in : Luke 14:23. “And the lord said unto
the servant, Go out into the highways and hedges, and compel them to come in,
that my house may be filled.”
Chapter
XV: The Beginning
Aliud est de silvestri cacumine videre... : “For it is one thing to see the land of peace from a wooded ridge . .. and
another to tread the road that leads to it.” Augustine, Confessions VII.21.
Griffiths ... a copious correspondence : None of this early correspondence
appears to have survived. The earliest of Lewis’s 46 letters to Griffiths published in
the Collected Letters dates from April 1934.
protest too much : Shakespeare,
Hamlet III.2, 225; see also the preceding passage in Hamlet for
some skeptical reflections on what Lewis here calls “the great passion or the
iron resolution”. One important place where Lewis expressed very similar ideas
is the passage towards the end of chapter 11 in his novel Perelandra,
where the hero’s great and difficult decision to resist evil is described (“...you
might say that he had been delivered from the rhetoric of his passions and had
emerged into unassailable freedom”).
We would be at Jerusalem : After Walter Hilton, The Scale
of Perfection II.21. “What so thou hearest or seest or feelest that should let thee in thy way, abide
not with it wilfully, tarry not for it restfully, behold it not, like it not,
dread it not; but aye go forth in thy way, and think that thou wouldest be at
Jerusalem”, etc.
Latest updates:
4 September 2008:
ch. 2, “slow maturing of old jokes”
ch. 2,
Dr. Grimstone’s school in Vice Versa
ch. 2,
Garuda Stone
ch. 4, Tamburlaine
the Great
ch. 4, Paracelsus
ch. 4,
Belfast Hippodrome
ch. 7,
“beyond expectation...”
29
September 2008
ch. 7,
several items of Celtic mythology
19 October 2008
more on ch. 10, Dyson’s “ancient, bitter earth”
23 November 2008
note on ch. 14, “That which I greatly feared...” expanded
12
February 2009
several
new notes in chapters IX through XV
27
February 2009
ch. 9, “eucatastrophe”
27 April 2011
ch. 9, added note on My debt to him is very great
4 May 2011
ch. 12, expanded note on Odora canum
vis (added reference to Lewis’s poem).
19 May 2011
ch. 13, added note on Carlyle’s lady
5 October 2011
ch. 14, expanded note on Alexander,
Space, Time and Deity
27 September 2012
ch. 14, added note on five great
Magdalen men
21 March 2013
ch. 13, added note on an old, dirty,
gabbling etc.
ch. 14, added note on In the Trinity Term
of 1929