New ignorance.

In The Narnian, Alan Jacobs repeatedly recommends English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Excluding Drama) as the best-written book by C.S. Lewis. Every other work, Jacobs says, could have used at least one more revision; English Literature in the Sixteenth Century was a scholarly work with an unusually long gestation. The introductory essay, “New Learning and New Ignorance,” is strong stuff; I recommend it to anyone who wants to see Lewis in full force. From page 26 of the 1954 edition:

“In the fourth chapter of Eothen Kinglake draws a contrast between a child reading Homer (in Pope's version) and a ‘learned commentator’. The child, he says, is ‘nearer by twenty centuries to the old Greeks’ because he is ‘not grubbing for beauties but pressing the siege’. In some ways this is a parallel to the difference between the medieval and the humanistic reader. The latter never really cares about the siege: he is too interested in literature, literature conceived almost exclusively as style, and style valued chiefly as a model for imitation.”

And, a little further, on page 27:

“Chapman's Homer might almost have been written to show that the real Homer was in that age impossible for us to assimilate. The great age of Greek influence is not the sixteenth century but the nineteenth. Shelley, Landor, Browning, Tennyson, Arnold, Ruskin, and even Morris, were all, in their different ways, more receptive of the Greek spirit than any Elizabethan.”

The whole thing is like that: a whirl of names whose work you feel you should have read, a familiar perspective on imagination and beauty freshly applied, and an utterly lucid line of argument.

(By the way, Lewis's line on the humanists is pretty similar to James Franklin's in the “Renaissance Myth” essay I mentioned last month.)