Quotes from Jocelyn Gibb

Is romantic yearning an appetite for [H]eaven, or is it the ultimate refinement of covetousness?

Lewis said sadly to me, 'When I at last realized that I was not, after all, going to be a great man...' I think he meant 'a great poet.

Like Johnson, Lewis was more impressive in his conversation than in his poetry, and more impressive in his prose - particularly in his learned prose - than in his conversation.

Lewis lived in as good a setting as any man for the life of vigilant aestheticism...His rooms were on the first floor of New Buildings 3, and ran the width of the building, so that the sitting-room looked out on Magdalen Grove, the other half of the suite commanding the Cloister, and, in the background, the incomparable Tower.

Man, to Lewis, is an immortal subject; pains are his moral remedies, salutary disciplines, willing sacrifices, playing their part in a drama of interchange between God and him.

Lewis had a] determined impersonality towards all except his very close friends.

When under suffering we see good men go to pieces we do not witness the failure of a moral discipline to take effect; we witness the advance of death where death comes by inches.

His tastes were essentially for what had magnitude and a suggestion of myth: the heroic and the romantic never failed to excite his imagination

What a pity it is that by such superfluous unrealities he should furnish the public with excuses to evade the overwhelming realism of his moral theology!

Lewis had a] determined impersonality towards all except his very closest friends.

The marks of this style are weight and clarity of argument, sudden turns of generalization and genial paradox, the telling short sentence to sum a complex paragraph, and unexpected touches of personal approach to the reader, whom he always assumes to be as logical, as learned, as romantic, and as open to conviction as himself. Not that in fact he was easily open to conviction; perhaps 'open to argument' would be a truer description.

I sense in his style an indefeasible core of Protestant certainties, the certainties of a simple, unchanging, entrenched ethic that knows how to distinguish, unarguably, between Right and Wrong, Natural and Unnatural, High and Low, Black and White, with a committed force, an ethic on which his ramified and seemingly conciliatory structures of argument are invisibly based

He had little sympathy...for Mirabel, and little for what I have called the New Sensibility of the early 'twenties, for its flat bleakness, its lawless versification, its unheroic tone, its unintelligible images, its 'modernity' in short.

It delighted him that he could find no use of the word modern in Shakespeare that did not carry its load of contempt.