Surprised by Joy, continued

So I told you that I was reading C.S. Lewis, "Surprised by Joy."

I mentioned that the first few chapters read like Joyce's "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," quaint recollections of a long-ago childhood in post-Victorian Britain.

Now Lewis has gone to war (WWI) and returned, and the autobiography suddenly ascends to a higher plane, albeit with an annoying tendency to assume that all readers will be familiar with the persons mentioned therein. Hence my tentative guesses within brackets.

Witness the following:

“Hitherto my whole bent had been towards things pale, remote and evanescent; the water-color world of [William?] Morris, the leafy recesses of [Sir Thomas?] Malory, the twilight of Yeats. The word “life” had for me pretty much the same associations it had for Shelley in The Triumph of Life. I would not have understood what Goethe meant by des Lebens goldnes Baum. [Henri?] Bergson showed me. He did not abolish my old loves, but he gave me a new one.

From him I first learned to relish energy, fertility and urgency; the resource, the triumphs, and even the insolence, of things that grow. I became capable of appreciating artists who would, I believe, have meant nothing to me before; all the resonant, dogmatic, flaming, unanswerable people like Beethoven, Titian (in his mythological pictures), Goethe, Dunbar, Pindar, Christopher Wren, and the more exultant Psalms.”