Present Concerns
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2 Sir Launcelot of the Arthurian Romances; Baron Bradwardine in Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley (1814); Terence Mulvaney is one of the three privates in Rudyard Kipling’s Soldiers Three (1888).
3 Sir Philip Sidney, The Arcadia (1590), Book V.
1 The Order of the Garter, instituted by King Edward III in 1344, is the highest order of knighthood. Lewis had in mind the comment made by Lord Melbourne (1779–1848) about the Order: ‘I like the Garter; there is no damned merit in it.’
2 Richard Porson (1759–1808), son of the parish clerk at East Ruston, near North Walsham, showed extraordinary memory when a boy, and by the help of various protectors he was educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1792 he became Regius Professor of Greek at Cambridge.
1 Women’s Auxilliary Air Force.
2 The Local Defence Volunteers were organised in May 1940 for men between the ages of 17 and 65. Their purpose was to deal with German parachutists. The name was changed to the Home Guard in December 1940, and conscription began in 1941. (See also the footnote to ‘Blimpophobia’ on p. 44.)
1 David Low (1891–1963) won great acclaim for his cartoons which appeared in the Evening Standard for whom he worked from 1926 to 1949. His most famous creation was ‘Colonel Blimp’ who was portrayed as a bald, rotund, elderly gentleman delivering himself of self-contradictory aphorisms. He has come to mean a muddle-headed type of complacent reactionary.
2 Peterloo is the name (a burlesque adaptation of Waterloo) given to a charge of cavalry and yeomanry on the Manchester reform meeting which was held in St Peter’s Field, Manchester, on 16 August 1819. It resulted in eleven people being killed, with about six hundred injured.
3 On 14 May 1940 the Secretary of State for War, Anthony Eden, broadcast an appeal for all men between the ages of 17 and 65 to enrol in an organisation to be known as the Local Defence Volunteers. Their primary purpose was to deal with the threat of German parachutists, and within a month the new force numbered nearly a million and a half. In July 1940 the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, altered its name to the Home Guard. Conscription began in 1941 and by December of that year Lewis began his duties with the Home Guard. Many men enjoyed the evening parades and drilling with whatever armament could be scraped together—shotguns, golf clubs, sticks. At times their fervour for catching Germans extended to stopping almost anyone who happened to be out at night. As a result, many people claimed to be more afraid of the Home Guard than of the Germans. Lewis was greatly relieved when the Home Guard received their ‘stand-down’ on 3 December 1944, which day was marked by a review of representative units in Hyde Park at which King George VI took the salute. That evening the King broadcast the nation’s thanks to the Home Guard for their ‘steadfast devotion’.
1 Winston Churchill.
2 Henry V, Act IV, scene 1, lines 134–35.
3 Henry V, Act IV, scene 1, line 136.
1 i.e., to refuse to associate with them.
1 1 Corinthians 1:21.
1 The Battle of Maldon, a poem in Old English of the tenth century, is about the raid of the Northmen under Anlaf, at Maldon in Essex, in 991. The Lays of Ancient Rome (1842) are by Thomas Macaulay, and Lepanto (1911) is by G. K. Chesterton.
2 From an unpublished poem by Owen Barfield.
1 This essay was first published as a Preface to D. E. Harding’s The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth: A New Diagram of Man in the Universe (London, 1952).
2 Friedrich Max Müller, The Science of Language (1864), Second Series, Lecture viii on ‘Metaphor’.
3 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, The Miller’s Prologue, line 3164.
4 ‘Sophism disguised as language.’
5 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), Book I, Part iv, section vii.
6 I. A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism (1924), chapter XXXV.
7 Hermann Hesse’s Das Glasperlenspiel (1943) has been translated into English as The Glass Bead Game by R. and C. Winston (London, 1970).
1 In 1913 William Richard Morris (1877–1963), later Lord Nuffield, opened a motor car factory in Cowley which is two miles from the centre of Oxford and about a mile from Lewis’s home. From the 1930s onward Morris Motors Ltd has dominated Cowley and made Oxford both a university and an industrial town.
2 Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Ethics.
3 Thomas Cartwright (1535–1603), a Puritan divine, was elected in 1550 a scholar of St John’s College, Cambridge, which at that time supported Reformation doctrines. In 1569 he was appointed Lady Margaret Professor at Cambridge. However, his vigorous criticism of the constitution of the Church of England caused him to lose his professorship. After a stay in Geneva he took an active part in furthering Presbyterianism and fostering the Puritan cause.
4 William Laud (1573–1645) when Bishop of St David’s conducted a controversy in which he maintained that the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of England are both parts of the same Catholic Church. He became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633 and his attempts to impose liturgical uniformity aroused the intense hostility of the Puritans. Mary Tudor (1516–1558), daughter of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon, became Queen of England in 1553.
5 ‘What you seek is here.’ Why did Lewis use Latin? Owen Barfield thinks he may have intended a ‘concealed allusion’ to St Matthew 28:5–6. In the Vulgate the angel says to the women at the empty tomb Nolite timere vos scio enim, quod Iesum, qui crucifixus est, quaeritis non est hic (‘Fear not you, for I know that you seek Jesus who was crucified. He is not here’). Miss Nan Dunbar has suggested that Lewis may have had in mind ‘an imperfectly remembered phrase’ from Horace’s Epistles I, xi, 29–30. Horace says to Bullatius ‘We seek for the good life by means of ships and carriages’ but Quod petis hic est (‘What you seek is here’)—est Ulubrae animus si te non deficit aequis (‘It’s at Ulubrae’—i.e., a small, almost deserted town—‘if only your composure doesn’t desert you’).
6 In Sinister Street (two volumes, 1913–1914).
1 John Barbour (1316?–1395) composed his poem The Bruce, celebrating the war of independence and deeds of King Robert and James Douglas, about 1375.
2 H. A. Mason, ‘Churchill’s Satire’, a review of The Poetical Works of Charles Churchill, ed. Douglas Grant (1956) in The Cambridge Review, vol. LXXVIII (11 May 1957), p. 571.
1 The publication of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover by Penguin Books in 1960 was the subject of the case Regina v. Penguin Books Limited at the Old Bailey during 20 October–2 November 1960. The case resulted in the acquittal of Penguin Books. A transcript of what was said at the trial was published under the title The Trial of Lady Chatterley, ed. C. H. Rolph (Penguin Books, 1961).
2 The Bishop of Woolwich was the Rt Rev. J. A. T. Robinson. Bishop Robinson said of the adulterous ‘sex relationship’ in Lady Chatterley’s Lover: ‘I think Lawrence tried to portray this relation as in a real sense something sacred, as in a real sense an act of holy communion’, The Trial of Lady Chatterley, p. 71.