“I do not think there can be much doubt as to the genuine and lasting quality of Clive’s individual abilities. He was born with the literary temperament, and we have to face that fact with all it implies . . . [I]t is the maturity and originality of his literary judgments which is so unusual and surprising. By an unerring instinct he detects first rate quality in literary workmanship, and the second rate does not interest him in any way. Now you will observe that these endowments, in themselves remarkable, do not facilitate the work of the teacher . . . The ideal pupil for University Scholarship purposes is a boy gifted with memory, receptiveness, patience, and strict attention to grammatical accuracy . . . The fact is that a critical and original faculty, whatever may be its promise for the future, is as much a hindrance as a help in the drudgery of early classical training. Clive has ideas of his own, and is not at all the sort of boy to be made a mere receptive machine . . ." W.T. Kirkpatrick (1915, writing to CSL’s father)
CSL and his father Albert Lewis (1918)
Photo courtesy or the Marion E. Wade Collection, Wheaton College, Illinois.
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