4/5/2023 0 Comments Inkling read![]() Reading it, you can see why Williams was, as well as being a writer and a publisher, a teacher of great renown. The same word, odd and sometimes inaccurate as it is, belongs to The Figure of Beatrice in Dante. It is a work of-this is the only word that fits-genius. You could compare it to Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man, but it is much more peculiar, much more wide-ranging, and, to me at least, more memorable. Subtitled “A Short History of the Holy Spirit in the Church,” it is indeed short (my paperback copy is a mere 214 pages) and covers everything from the day of Pentecost to the twentieth century. The Descent of the Dove, however, is without any parallel. He Came Down from Heaven suffers from some of the same faults. Lewis’s cronies known as the Inklings-is hastily written and seldom sticks to a point. ![]() ![]() The Forgiveness of Sins-dedicated to the friends of his last years, that Oxford group of C. Thatcher’s cabinet ministers and now the provost of Eton College, expressed his regard for it: “I still think- ‘I saw a Druid light/Burn through the Druid Hill’ pretty good.”Īnd then there is the Christian apologetics. In a recent autobiography, William Waldegrave, once one of Mrs. It has a certain “something” that no other twentieth-century poet quite has. If the early stuff-written under the dire influence of Alice Meynell, Francis Thompson, and other “nineties” Catholics-would make a normal reader cringe, and the later stuff-when he had discovered Eliot and modernism-is not technically good, it is nonetheless memorable. Eliot-like Williams, a London publisher with an adherence to the Catholic wing of the Church of England-borrowed from one of them, The Greater Trumps, a key image in The Four Quartets: “At the still point of the turning world.”īy a similar token, Williams’s poetry is avidly read by his admirers, and you can see why. Tolkien, no great reader of modern fiction, found them compelling, and why another fan, T. Lewis pressed them upon his friends, why J. Yet there is nothing else quite like them in English literature, and you can see why C. They are ill-constructed, often carelessly written, and the characters are either so lightly drawn as to be indistinguishable from one another, or etched in crude caricature. His seven novels, compulsive reading for their adepts, fail all the normal tests by which one would judge the merits of a work of fiction. The word “cult” here describes someone who cannot easily be judged by conventional standards of literary taste. Harles Williams (1886–1945) was a cult figure in his lifetime, and he remains one.
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