George MacDonald (1824–1905) was a Scottish poet, novelist, preacher and writer of fairy tales whose work, in more than fifty volumes published between 1855 and 1898, sets out a single religious vision in three registers: the “unspoken” sermon, the realistic novel of Scottish and English life, and the symbolic romance or Märchen [fairy tale] — Phantastes (1858), “The Golden Key” (1867), At the Back of the North Wind (1871), the two Princess books (1872, 1883) and Lilith (1895). Reared in the federal Calvinism of the Aberdeenshire Missionar Kirk, trained as a Congregational minister and driven from his only pastorate in 1853 for “German theology”, he came to teach that God is a Father whose love is inexorable and therefore a “consuming fire”; that hell is remedial and that the whole creation, animals included, will be restored; that the will, not the intellect, is the organ of religious knowledge, so that “only as we do, can we know”; that death is “only more life”; and that the human imagination, “made in the image of the imagination of God”, finds its forms in a nature that is God’s thought made visible. He did not call this a system and refused every label offered him, but it was learned from identifiable masters — Jacob Boehme through William Law, Novalis, Coleridge and Wordsworth, the Scottish universalists Thomas Erskine and A. J. Scott, and F. D. Maurice — and it was transmitted, above all through C. S. Lewis, who called him “my master”, to the twentieth-century tradition of mythopoeic fiction. He knew the mesmerists and spiritualists of his day at first hand and rejected their methods while keeping their questions; he read Swedenborg, hung Blake on his walls and taught himself Dutch to read Boehme; and he built the Lilith of the Talmud, the second sight of the Highlands, the alchemical shadow and the dream-vision into a fiction whose subject, from first to last, is the death of the self-owning self and the waking of the true one.1
Life#
Huntly and Aberdeen (1824–1845)#
MacDonald was born on 10 December 1824 in Duke Street, Huntly, a market town on the Bogie in Strathbogie, Aberdeenshire, in a house his father had built at the corner of Church Street; the grandmother’s house next door, separated by a garden from the family’s thread-mill, is the “Rothieden” home of Robert Falconer. The traditions that place his birth in Bogie Street or at Upper Pirriesmill are wrong: the family moved to the farm at Upper Pirriesmill in 1826. His father, George MacDonald senior, bleacher, thread-spinner and later miller, was a man of stoic humour who had his left leg amputated for “white swelling” in 1825 and who paid in full the debts of a brother that had crippled the family firm; the son’s dedication of his Poems of 1857 to him — “the sense thy living self did breed / That fatherhood is at the great world’s core” — is the plainest statement of where the theology of Fatherhood came from. His mother, Helen MacKay, from the MacKay country of north-west Sutherland, died of tuberculosis in 1832 when he was eight; the father remarried in 1839, and the stepmother, Margaret McColl, outlived her stepson. Of six brothers two died in childhood; Alexander and John Hill MacDonald, the nearest to him in age, died of consumption in the 1850s. The paternal great-grandfather was a Culloden piper, blinded in the battle and settled at Portsoy; the family tradition of descent from a survivor of Glencoe cannot, as Greville MacDonald admitted, be authenticated. Gaelic was the speech of his father’s grandfather and of the drovers he listened to as a boy at the Gordon Arms; he never mastered it, but he wrote in 1867 of “the weakness to be proud of my Celtic birth”.2
The religion of the household was that of the grandmother Isabella Robertson, who had taken her family out of the parish church into the “Missionar Kirk”, the Congregational chapel of the evangelical revival, and whose zeal her grandson drew in the grandmother of Robert Falconer — the woman who burns her grandson’s violin as an idol and prays that the Lord would take her rather than damn her son. What the boy absorbed was the federal Calvinism of election and reprobation, the Shorter Catechism and a strict Sabbath; what he later said he had absorbed with it was a lifelong revolt: “One of my earliest recollections is of beginning to be at strife with the false system here assailed.” He was taught at the Huntly school by a master whose floggings became those of Murdoch Malison in Alec Forbes of Howglen, and in the autumn of 1840, after three months at the Aulton Grammar School in Old Aberdeen, took twelfth place in the bursary competition and a Fullarton bursary of £14 a year at King’s College, Aberdeen. He read mathematics, natural philosophy and chemistry — a letter of October 1841 debates “whether or not I should study Chemistry” — and graduated M.A. in March 1845. The summer of 1842 he is said to have spent cataloguing a neglected library in “a certain castle or mansion in the far North”, where he discovered “a whole nest of the German classics”; the fact rests on a note by his cousin’s husband Robert Troup and on the library scenes of The Portent and Alec Forbes, and the house has never been identified — Thurso Castle was Greville’s unconfirmed guess, Dunbeath the alternative. Whatever its location, it was in these years that he read Novalis, Jean Paul, Hoffmann, Fouqué and Schiller, and the German Romanticism that the deacons of Arundel would later hold against him was the possession of the undergraduate.3
London, Highbury, and Arundel (1845–1853)#
From 1845 to 1848 he was a private tutor in London, at Fulham, an experience he later gave to Hugh Sutherland in David Elginbrod and to Wilfrid Cumbermede; visiting a cousin at Clapton he met Louisa Powell, daughter of James Powell, a Nonconformist leather merchant, to whom he became engaged in the autumn of 1848. In the same year he entered Highbury College, the Independent theological academy, where as a Master of Arts he was excused half the course and where he found the ways of the place “uncongenial”; in the summer of 1849 he supplied a pulpit at Cork for three months, and in August 1850 accepted a temporary charge at Trinity Congregational Church, Arundel, in Sussex, which became a call at £150 a year. A lung haemorrhage in November 1850 postponed his ordination, which took place in June 1851, and he married Louisa on 8 March 1851 at the Old Gravel Pits chapel, Hackney. From Arundel on 15 April 1851 he wrote to his father the sentence that fixed his position for life: “I firmly believe people have hitherto been a great deal too much taken up about doctrine and far too little about practice … I am neither Arminian nor Calvinist. To no system would I subscribe.” At Christmas 1851 he had privately printed, for his friends, Twelve of the Spiritual Songs of Novalis, his first publication.4
The “heresy hunt” of 1852, as Greville called it, was a small affair with large consequences. In June the deacons informed him that the chapel could no longer pay £150 a year and hinted that he should take the reduction “as a kindly hint” to resign; pressed, they named two charges. The first was a sermon on the text “He that doeth my will shall know of the doctrine” in which he had said that some provision was made for the heathen after death; the second, “even more shocking”, was that he was “tainted with German theology” — a charge that Greville traced to the Novalis pamphlet. The often-repeated statement that he was also charged with teaching that animals would go to heaven is not what the records show: the hope that “the lower animals too would be sharers in the better life to come” was gossip about him, not one of the deacons’ counts, and the church resolution of July 1852 objected only to the doctrine “that with the Heathen the time of trial does not … cease at their death, which certainly implies a future state of probation”. Nor was his stipend “halved”: the chapel books show £56 16s. paid for his last half-year, a cut of about a quarter. He put the matter to the whole congregation on 5 July 1852 rather than resign at the deacons’ bidding, stayed on for ten months, and resigned in May 1853 — not, as the Dictionary of National Biography said, at “the close of 1853”. “Far rather would I be such a Unitarian as Dr. Channing than such a Christian as … the greater number of those, that talk about his Divinity,” he wrote on 20 May; “it is better for me to be driven away than to break up such ties … for the sake of getting a larger salary.” He never held a pastorate again.5
Manchester, Algiers, and Hastings (1853–1859)#
He went to Manchester because Alexander John Scott was there. Scott, deposed by the Presbytery of Paisley in 1831 for refusing to assent that Christ died for the elect only, was the first Principal of Owens College, and MacDonald called him “the greatest man he had ever known” and dedicated Robert Falconer to him; the sermon “The Consuming Fire” names him as the man who “worshipped him from its face”. In Manchester MacDonald took a room in Renshaw Street where “a few earnest disciples gathered round him”, preached also at Bolton, lectured, and wrote to his father that “I do not at all expect to become minister of any existing Church, but I hope to gather a few around me soon”; his friend of these years, the poet Henry Septimus Sutton, became a Swedenborgian preacher. Within and Without, the dramatic poem written in the winter of 1850–51, was published by Longmans in 1855 and won him Tennyson’s notice and the “intense admiration” of Lady Byron, the poet’s widow, who became his patron: when a near-fatal illness in 1855–56 sent him south she paid for a winter in Algiers (October 1856 to April 1857). From 1857 to October 1859 the family lived at 27 Tackleway, Hastings, renamed Huntly Cottage, where he wrote Phantastes (Smith, Elder, 1858) and where two of the decisive contacts of his life were made. Through the stammering specialist James Hunt he met Charles Lutwidge Dodgson; and he attended the lectures of a Polish mesmerist named Zamoiski, who became the von Funkelstein of David Elginbrod. His father died in August 1858 and his brother John the month before; Poems (1857) had been dedicated to the father from Algiers.6
London: Bedford College, The Retreat, and the Broad Church (1859–1872)#
In 1859 he moved to London, took the chair of English literature at Bedford College, the women’s college in Bedford Square (October 1859 to 1867, at thirty to fifty guineas a year), lectured on Shakespeare, Burns, Dante and Wordsworth to any institution that would pay, and began to write for a living. The addresses record the poverty and the rise: 18 Queen Square (1859), Tudor Lodge, Albert Street, Regent’s Park (c. 1860–63), 12 Earls Terrace, Kensington (1863–67) and, from the autumn of 1867, The Retreat on the Upper Mall at Hammersmith, the house that William Morris took in 1878 and renamed Kelmscott House. Lady Byron died in May 1860 leaving him £300 at a moment when the family had lost its last sovereign. David Elginbrod, refused by every publisher in London, reached Hurst & Blackett in 1863 because Dinah Mulock, the author of John Halifax, Gentleman, “told them they were fools to refuse it”; they paid £90 and he never again had difficulty in placing a book. Then came Adela Cathcart and The Portent (1864), Alec Forbes of Howglen (1865), Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood and Dealings with the Fairies (1867), Robert Falconer and Guild Court (1868): the Scottish novels made the money that the romance had not. He lost the Edinburgh chair of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres to David Masson in 1865 — the epitaph of Martin Elginbrod, Greville thought, “stood in his way” — and lectured at King’s College, London, from 1865 or 1866 to 1868; in 1868 his own university, Aberdeen, made him LL.D. “in consideration of his ‘high literary eminence as a poet and an author’”. Dodgson, now “Uncle Dodgson” to the children, brought the manuscript of Alice’s Adventures Under Ground to Tudor Lodge in 1863, and Louisa read it to the family: “I, being aged six, exclaimed that there ought to be sixty thousand volumes of it”, Greville remembered, and the family’s enthusiasm helped to persuade Dodgson to publish.7
The theological company of these years was the Broad Church circle around Frederick Denison Maurice, dismissed from King’s College in 1853 for treating eternal punishment as a popular superstition. Maurice stood godfather to the MacDonalds’ ninth child, Maurice (born 1864); The Miracles of Our Lord (1870) was dedicated to him; and MacDonald’s manuscript “Thanksgiving for F. D. Maurice” contains a stanza he suppressed in print: “He taught that hell itself is yet within / The confines of thy kingdom; and its fires / The endless conflict of thy love with sin.” About 1865–66 MacDonald became a lay communicant at Maurice’s church, St Peter’s, Vere Street — a dissenting minister’s son and a deposed Congregationalist who now took the sacrament in the Church of England without ever seeking its orders and without, as Greville insisted, renouncing his own conviction that he belonged to “no so-called church under the sun”. Through the same circle he knew Charles Kingsley, Octavia Hill (for whose tenantry he gave annual entertainments at The Retreat), the Christian Socialists of the Working Men’s College, and the Pre-Raphaelites: Arthur Hughes, who illustrated Dealings with the Fairies, At the Back of the North Wind and The Princess and the Goblin, was a friend from 1860, and the Burne-Joneses were guests. John Ruskin, introduced about 1863, made MacDonald and Louisa the confidants of his hopeless courtship of Rose La Touche, whose crisis of 1872 — Rose at The Retreat in August, Ruskin hurrying home from Venice for “three days of heaven” — MacDonald had already transposed into Wilfrid Cumbermede. From October 1869 to 1872 he edited Good Words for the Young, in which At the Back of the North Wind, Ranald Bannerman’s Boyhood and The Princess and the Goblin were serialised; by 1871 he was “more and more glad I am to be rid of the editing”.8
America (1872–1873)#
In September 1872, with Louisa and Greville, he sailed for Boston under contract to James Redpath’s lecture bureau at £30 a lecture and no more than five lectures a week. They were the guests of James T. Fields; Harriet Beecher Stowe met them on arrival, Emerson came to lunch, and they went on to Longfellow, Phillips Brooks and Whittier. The first lecture, on 10 October at Cambridgeport, was his first anywhere on Burns, which Greville was to hear “over forty times”; at the Boston Lyceum 2,850 ticket-holders filled the hall and Redpath complained that they could have charged three hundred dollars a night. The repertory was Burns, Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, Tom Hood, Tennyson and Milton; the itinerary took in New York, Princeton (where Dr McCosh asked him to preach), Elmira — where on 27 January 1873 the family were entertained by the Langdons and met Samuel Clemens — Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Chicago, Ann Arbor, Niagara and Canada. In New York a deputation of deacons from a Fifth Avenue church offered him its pastorate at $20,000 a year, “a salary equivalent to an English bishop’s”; he declined “without discussion or delay”. The tour ended on 19 May 1873 with a farewell lecture on Hamlet in Association Hall, New York, William Cullen Bryant in the chair and Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Charles Dudley Warner and Whitelaw Reid on the platform. Illness had cost him fees and he brought home little more than a thousand pounds, but he had become an American author; Twain visited Hammersmith that July, proposed in 1883 to co-write a novel with him for the sake of a transatlantic copyright (MacDonald’s suggestion; Twain declined), and wrote in 1899 of the little copy of At the Back of the North Wind that his dead daughter Susy had loved. The friendship with Walt Whitman that some accounts add to the tour rests on no evidence found in the family record.9
Broadlands, Boscombe, and the Move to Italy (1873–1880)#
The Retreat was given up in 1875 and the family moved between Hastings, Great Tangley Manor and “Corage” at Boscombe. In these years MacDonald was closest to William Cowper-Temple, later Lord Mount-Temple, and his wife Georgina, whose house at Broadlands in Hampshire was the meeting-place of the “Higher Life” conferences from 1874 and of a society in which spiritualism, Anglican holiness teaching and Pre-Raphaelite art overlapped. He was among the hundred guests at the first Broadlands Conference in July 1874 and supported that of 1877, and it was at Broadlands, on 21 December 1875, that he wrote to Louisa of a medium in the house: “There is a Mrs. A. here. I don’t take to her much, but Ruskin is very much interested. She has seen and described, without ever having seen her, Rose whispering to Mr. Ruskin. He is convinced.” The sentence is the nearest MacDonald came to a verdict on the séance, and it is repeated in the poem he wrote for Louisa after their daughter Mary died in 1878, refusing to comfort her with the assurance that the child “is watching thee from somewhere nigh”, which “were but to mock thy weary pain / With pleasant fancies of a half-held creed.” Louisa’s dramatisation of the second part of The Pilgrim’s Progress, first performed at Christchurch on 8 March 1877, the couple’s wedding anniversary, with MacDonald as Greatheart and Lilia as Christiana, toured England and Scotland each summer until 1887, the Lord Chamberlain having refused to license a religious play in London. On 2 November 1877 Disraeli’s secretary wrote that the Queen had granted him a Civil List pension of £100 a year. The family had by then eleven children — Lilia (1852), Mary (1853), Grace (1854), Greville (1856), Irene (1857), Winifred (1858), Ronald (1860), Robert Falconer (1862), Maurice (1864), Bernard (1865) and George MacKay (1867) — and tuberculosis was in the house: Mary died at Nervi in April 1878, Maurice at Porto Fino in March 1879, Grace in 1884, Lilia, the actress of the family, in her father’s arms at Bordighera in November 1891. The winters of 1877–79 at Nervi and Porto Fino were followed, at Christmas 1880, by the move into Casa Coraggio at Bordighera on the Ligurian coast, a house planned by MacDonald himself and paid for by a subscription of friends — Princess Alice of Hesse, the Ducies, the Cowper-Temples, the Russell Gurneys, Octavia Hill and her sisters, the younger Maurices, relatives and old servants — and a mortgage. The figure of £1,500 that appears in some accounts of the subscription is not in the family record.10
Bordighera and the Last Years (1880–1905)#
Casa Coraggio, with its great living-room, its organ and its Sunday services and theatricals for the English colony, was the family’s home for twenty years and the place where most of the later work was written: Unspoken Sermons II and III (1885, 1889), The Tragedie of Hamlet (1885), What’s Mine’s Mine (1886), The Hope of the Gospel (1892), the Poetical Works (1893) and Lilith, first drafted in 1890 and published in 1895. MacDonald continued to tour Britain lecturing each year until the autumn of 1891 — forty-eight lectures in fifty-eight days, the last on 6 November, after which “he never spoke again in public for any fee” — and wrote his last novels, Salted with Fire (1897) and the short Far Above Rubies (1898). At Bordighera he taught himself Spanish and then Dutch, the latter “with the idea, I think, of getting nearer understanding with Jacob Böhme”, as Greville put it, whose works in William Law’s quarto edition and an early Dutch Forty Questions stood on his shelves; four of Blake’s illustrations to Blair’s Grave hung in his study. The family’s doctor and friend was John Arthur Goodchild, physician, poet and “strange mystical mind”, for whom MacDonald testified in an Italian court in the winter of 1896–97 and who was later to bury and rediscover the “Glastonbury cup”. In 1897 his health gave way — a severe eczema and, as he himself recognised, a brain that “sometimes would not respond to his imagination”; the “stroke” of 1898 given in some timelines is not in Greville’s account, which speaks of a “long vigil” in which “for five years he scarcely spoke one word”. St George’s Wood at Haslemere, designed by his son Robert, was built for Louisa in 1900; the golden wedding was celebrated there in June 1901; Louisa died at Bordighera on 13 January 1902. In about the autumn of 1904 he was taken to “Sagamore”, the house of his daughter Winifred and her husband Edward Troup at Ashtead in Surrey, and there he died on 18 September 1905. After a funeral at St Giles’, Ashtead, on 21 September, his body was cremated at Woking and the ashes buried at Bordighera beside Louisa, Lilia and Grace.11
Thought#
The System in Outline#
MacDonald wrote no systematic theology and distrusted the word “system”; “Our Lord had no design of constructing a system of truth in intellectual forms,” he wrote, and he refused to the end of his life to be called a Universalist, a Broad Churchman, a mystic or anything else. But the teaching set out in the three series of Unspoken Sermons (1867, 1885, 1889), in The Hope of the Gospel (1892), in the two essays on the imagination (1867, 1893) and, in another language, in the romances, is remarkably consistent over forty years, and it can be mapped.12
At the top is God, who is first and last Father: not the Governor and Judge of the Calvinism in which MacDonald was reared, whose “portrait” by Jonathan Edwards he turned from “with loathing”, but the God “seen in the face of Jesus Christ”, whose essence is love and whose love is creative. The Son is eternally begotten of the Father and is the Father’s “response”: what in the Father is self-existence is in the Son self-abnegation, “the refusal of himself”, and all things are made “in” him, so that human consciousness and reason are “shadows” of his. The mark of this God is that he is childlike: “the childlike is the divine”, and the child set in the midst of the disciples is the key to the Trinity itself. The Spirit is not separately treated; it appears as the presence of God in the obedient conscience and in “a wise imagination”.
Below God stands the human being, who is essentially a will in relation to the Father’s will. The primal sin is self-ownership — “The one principle of hell is — ‘I am my own’” — and the shadow, the usurping self, the clenched hand and the “dead” who refuse to die are its emblems in the fiction. Salvation is the death of that self and the emergence of the true one, which God alone knows and names (“the new name”): each person is “a distinct flower or tree in the spiritual garden of God” with “a secret of the Divinity” in him, “a chamber in God” into which he alone can enter. The organ by which the creature comes to know the Father is obedience, not belief: “to hold a thing with the intellect, is not to believe it”; “only as we do, can we know”; “Obedience is the one key of life.”
The relation between the two is love, and love is inexorable. “Our God is a consuming fire” means that God’s love destroys in the beloved whatever is not lovely; the fire is “just the original, the active form of Purity”. Hell is that fire “without light”, “the outer darkness” of the self left alone with itself; it is God’s instrument and it is remedial: its doors “do not open until entire satisfaction is rendered, the last farthing paid”, and the farthing is repentance. Penal substitution, imputed righteousness and eternal retribution are therefore “all and altogether the invention of men”; God is not bound to punish sin but “to destroy sin”; justice and mercy “are simply one and the same thing”; Christ is “our atonement” in the sense that in him we are made at one with God. MacDonald’s hope — he never states it as a dogma — is that the fire will at last consume Death and Hell themselves, that “our poor brothers and sisters, every one” will be “burnt clean and brought home”, and that the animals and “the whole creation” will rise with the sons of God.
Death, accordingly, is not the enemy: “it is only more life”; “Life is the only reality; what men call death is but a shadow.” The dead are near; the “inner vision” of the Highlanders is a real faculty; sleep in the house of death is the figure of the soul’s healing; and this life is the dream from which the soul will wake “into that life which, as a mother her child, carries this life in its bosom”.
The visible world is the thought of God made perceptible: “not merely a thing which God hath made, subjecting it to laws; but … an expression of the thought, the feeling, the heart of God himself” — a “Christian pantheism”, in MacDonald’s own phrase for Wordsworth. Nature’s forms are “the embodiment of God’s thought” and therefore the only possible clothing of human thought; “the world is … the human being turned inside out”; the truth of a thing is not the facts about it but “the blossom of it, the thing it is made for”. The human imagination, “made in the image of the imagination of God”, cannot create from nothing; it finds, lights and arranges the forms God has made, and in doing so it discovers. A fairy tale, its highest product, is “not an allegory”; it is like a sonata, “there not so much to convey a meaning as to wake a meaning”, and it must obey the laws of the moral world while inventing the laws of its own.
The ethic follows: the neighbour is “just the man who is next to you at the moment”; love of neighbour “is the only door out of the dungeon of self”; the rich cannot enter the kingdom while they possess what they cannot do without; animals are “our poor relations”, and to torture them for knowledge is to prefer the tree of knowledge to the tree of life; suffering is educative, and God is “easy to please and hard to satisfy”. The whole is a Christian Platonism of the will, learned from Boehme through William Law, from Novalis and Coleridge, from Erskine, Scott and Maurice, and stated in the words of John, Paul and the Sermon on the Mount.13
The Father and the Childlike#
The first sermon MacDonald printed, “The Child in the Midst” (on Mark 9:33–37), supplies the hermeneutical rule for everything that follows. The lesson of the child whom Jesus set among the disciples lies “not in the humanity, but in the childhood of the child”; and since “he that receiveth me, receiveth him that sent me”, the chain runs upward: “God is represented in Jesus, for that God is like Jesus: Jesus is represented in the child, for that Jesus is like the child. Therefore God is represented in the child, for that he is like the child. God is childlike.” Hence “Childhood belongs to the divine nature. Obedience, then, is as divine as Will, Service as divine as Rule”; hence “childhood is the deepest heart of humanity — its divine heart”; and hence the theologians who “represent him as a great King on a grand throne, thinking how grand he is” have missed the only king there is: “Brothers, have you found our king? There he is, kissing little children and saying they are like God.” The same conviction underlies the sentence of 1893 that MacDonald’s readers know best: “For my part, I do not write for children, but for the childlike, whether of five, or fifty, or seventy-five.”14
The Fatherhood is not adoptive. In “Abba, Father!” MacDonald attacks the Pauline doctrine of “adoption” as the Calvinists read it: “A father is a father from the beginning. A primary relation cannot be superinduced”; the Greek huiothesia means “the raising of a father’s own child from the condition of tutelage … to the position and rights of a son … a spiritual coming of age”; and “We are the sons of God the moment we lift up our hearts, seeking to be sons.” The Son is eternally Son, and “The Creation in Christ” (on John 1:3–4, read with the Alexandrian punctuation “that which was made in him was life”) makes his generation the pattern of all creation: “the Father is the greater … if the Father had not been, the Son could not have been”; “The response to self-existent love is self-abnegating love. The refusal of himself is that in Jesus which corresponds to the creation of God”; and God’s “imagination is one with his creative will. The thing that God imagines, that thing exists.” Human beings are made “in” that Sonship — “while God is the father of his children, Jesus is the father of their sonship” — so that “our very beings and understandings and consciousnesses, though but shadows in regard to any perfection either of outline or operation, are yet shadows of his being, his understanding, his consciousness.” “Life” (on John 10:10) adds a doctrine of creation as divine labour: “it is not easy for him to create … The problem is, so far to separate from himself that which must yet on him be ever and always and utterly dependent, that it shall have the existence of an individual, and be able to turn and regard him — choose him”; “The being of God is love, therefore creation. I imagine that from all eternity he has been creating.”15
The Bible is subordinate to this Father and Son. “The Higher Faith” (on John 20:29) denies that Scripture “lays claim to be regarded as the Word, the Way, the Truth”: “The Bible leads us to Jesus, the inexhaustible, the ever unfolding Revelation of God”; “let us hold the Bible dear as the moon of our darkness … not dear as the sun”; and “Sad, indeed, would the whole matter be, if the Bible had told us everything God meant us to believe.” The “great heresy of the Church of the present day” is unbelief in the Spirit’s individual revelation, and “the spiritually vulgar notion of the verbal inspiration of the Scriptures” is dismissed in The Hope of the Gospel on the evidence of the divergent texts of Isaiah. Where the Bible seems to picture a God unlike Jesus, “we are at least equally bound to refuse any interpretation which seems to us unlike him”; and, in the sermon “Justice”, “if the Bible said so, the Bible would lie; but the Bible does not say so … God cannot be lied for. He is the truth.”16
The Will: Obedience, Self-Denial, and the New Name#
For MacDonald the person is a will, and intellect and feeling are secondary. “The will is the deepest, the strongest, the divinest thing in man; so, I presume, is it in God, for such we find it in Jesus Christ. Here, and here only, in the relation of the two wills, God’s and his own, can a man come into vital contact … with the All-in-all.” The statement of the contrary principle, the one from which every villain and every shadow in his fiction descends, is in “Kingship”: “the one principle of hell is — ‘I am my own. I am my own king and my own subject. I am the centre from which go out my thoughts; I am the object and end of my thoughts … My own glory is, and ought to be, my chief care … The more I am all in all to myself, the greater I am … I will be free with the freedom that consists in doing whatever I am inclined to do.’” Against it stands Christ’s, “that my perfect freedom, my pure individuality, rests on the fact that I have not another will than his.” Mara says the same to Lilith: “There is no slave but the creature that wills against its creator.”17
Because the person is a will, religious knowledge is the fruit of obedience and of nothing else. This is the most insistent theme in the sermons and the one Lewis learned from them. “It is to the man who is trying to live, to the man who is obedient to the word of the Master, that the word of the Master unfolds itself”; “life, that is, action, is alone the human condition into which the light of the Living can penetrate.” “Many eat and drink and talk and teach in his presence; few do the things he says to them! Obedience is the one key of life.” “Instead of asking yourself whether you believe or not, ask yourself whether you have this day done one thing because he said, Do it, or once abstained because he said, Do not do it”; “to hold a thing with the intellect, is not to believe it”; “A man’s real belief is that which he lives by”; “only as we do, can we know.” Faith, asked to define itself, is “The leaving of your way, your objects, yourself, and the taking of his and him; the leaving of your trust in men, in money, in opinion, in character, in atonement itself, and doing as he tells you.” The counsel is meant with entire literalness — “bethink thee of something that thou oughtest to do, and go and do it, if it be but the sweeping of a room, or the preparing of a meal, or a visit to a friend. Heed not thy feelings: Do thy work” — and it is the ladder of the Diary of an Old Soul: “Thy doors are deeds; the handles are their doing”; “Only obedience holds: — / I haste, I rise, I do the thing he saith.” The famous aphorism “Do the truth ye know, and you shall learn the truth you need to know”, so often credited to the sermons, does not occur there in those words; the doctrine does. “The man is a true man who chooses duty; he is a perfect man who at length never thinks of duty.”18
The self is therefore both God’s gift and the usurper to be slain. “The Self is God’s making — only it must be the ‘slave of Christ’”; “The self is given to us that we may sacrifice it”; “we must keep on denying … the will itself is not pure, is not free, until the Self is absolutely denied”; “The wrath will consume what they call themselves; so that the selves God made shall appear.” The fictional emblem is the Shadow that Anodos acquires in Phantastes by opening the ogress’s forbidden closet and that withers everything it falls on, and the lesson of his defeat: “I learned that it is better, a thousand-fold, for a proud man to fall and be humbled, than to hold up his head in his pride and fancied innocence. I learned that he that will be a hero, will barely be a man; that he that will be nothing but a doer of his work, is sure of his manhood.” Even this is not the last word, because self “will come to life even in the slaying of self; but there is ever something deeper and stronger than it, which will emerge at last from the unknown abysses of the soul.” Mr Raven in Lilith gives the epistemology: “No one can say he is himself, until first he knows that he IS, and then what HIMSELF is. In fact, nobody is himself, and himself is nobody.” And “The Last Farthing” gives the eschatology: the outer darkness is “God’s prison, his own separated self”, and “The man who minds only himself must at last go mad if God did not interfere.”19
What survives the death of the self is not nothing but the individual as God thought him. “The New Name” (on the white stone of Revelation 2:17) is MacDonald’s doctrine of individuality, and it is the sermon in which he comes nearest to the language of the theosophers. “The true name is one which expresses the character, the nature, the being, the meaning of the person who bears it. It is the man’s own symbol — his soul’s picture, in a word … Who can give a man this, his own name? God alone.” “Each of us is a distinct flower or tree in the spiritual garden of God — precious, each for his own sake”; “Each has within him a secret of the Divinity; each is growing towards the revelation of that secret to himself”; “He can worship God as no man else can worship him — can understand God as no man else can understand him”; “With every man he has a secret — the secret of the new name. In every man there is a loneliness, an inner chamber of peculiar life into which God only can enter”; and “There is no massing of men with God.” The same sermon contains MacDonald’s definition of mysticism, given in passing and with a pointed reference: “A mystical mind is one which, having perceived that the highest expression of which the truth admits, lies in the symbolism of nature and the human customs that result from human necessities, prosecutes thought about truth so embodied by dealing with the symbols themselves after logical forms. This is the highest mode of conveying the deepest truth” — the Apocalypse, he adds, “reminding one … of the mysticism of Swedenborg”. “The Truth” (on John 14:6) completes the anthropology: “Their very being … is the undeveloped Christ in them, and his likeness to Christ is the truth of a man, even as the perfect meaning of a flower is the truth of a flower … The truth of every man, I say, is the perfected Christ in him.”20
The Consuming Fire: Justice, Atonement, Hell, and the Restoration of All#
“Nothing is inexorable but love. Love which will yield to prayer is imperfect and poor.” The sermon “The Consuming Fire” (on Hebrews 12:29), the keystone of the first series and of the whole theology, argues from the nature of love to the nature of hell. “For love loves unto purity … Therefore all that is not beautiful in the beloved, all that comes between and is not of love’s kind, must be destroyed. And our God is a consuming fire.” The fire of Sinai was “a true symbol, not a final vision”; “It is not that the fire will burn us if we do not worship thus; but that the fire will burn us until we worship thus”; “The consuming fire is just the original, the active form of Purity — that which makes pure, that which is indeed Love, the creative energy of God.” The outer darkness “is but the most dreadful form of the consuming fire — the fire without light — the darkness visible, the black flame. God hath withdrawn himself, but not lost his hold.” And the sermon ends in a prayer that MacDonald never turned into a proposition: “But at length, O God, wilt thou not cast Death and Hell into the lake of Fire — even into thine own consuming self? … For then our poor brothers and sisters, every one … shall have been burnt clean and brought home … shall a man be more merciful than God? Shall, of all his glories, his mercy alone not be infinite?” The Son, in the same sermon, “instead of accepting the sacrifice of one of his creatures to satisfy his justice or support his dignity, gave himself utterly unto them … who suffered unto the death, not that men might not suffer, but that their suffering might be like his, and lead them up to his perfection” — the sentence Lewis set at the head of The Problem of Pain.21
“Justice” (on Psalm 62:12), the longest of the sermons, is the frontal attack on the penal theory. “The punishment of the wrongdoer makes no atonement for the wrong done. How could it make up to me for the stealing of my watch that the man was punished?”; “Punishment is nowise an offset to sin … Suffering weighs nothing at all against sin”; “Primarily, God is not bound to punish sin; he is bound to destroy sin”; “‘Mercy may be against justice.’ Never — if you mean by justice what I mean by justice. If anything be against justice, it cannot be called mercy, for it is cruelty.” Punishment is retained, but as medicine: “where punishment can do anything to this end, where it can help the sinner to know what he has been guilty of … justice requires that punishment shall not be spared … If suffering cannot serve this end, we need look for no more hell, but for the destruction of sin by the destruction of the sinner. That, however, would, it appears to me, be for God to suffer defeat.” The rejected system is stated fairly — “God is bound to punish sin, and to punish it to the uttermost … Jesus Christ says, ‘I will take his punishment upon me.’ God accepts his offer, and lets man go unpunished — upon a condition” — and then repudiated in the strongest words MacDonald ever printed: “I declare my utter and absolute repudiation of the idea in any form whatever. Rather than believe in a justice — that is, a God — to whose righteousness … it could be any satisfaction for the wrongdoing of a man that a man who did no wrong should suffer, I would be driven from among men, and dwell with the wild beasts”; “The whole device is a piece of spiritual charlatanry — fit only for a fraudulent jail-delivery”; “I know the root of all that can be said on the subject; the notion is imbedded in the gray matter of my Scotch brains; and if I reject it, I know what I reject.” The credo at the sermon’s end is the nearest thing to a confession of faith he wrote: “I believe that justice and mercy are simply one and the same thing; without justice to the full there can be no mercy, and without mercy to the full there can be no justice; that such is the mercy of God that he will hold his children in the consuming fire of his distance until they pay the uttermost farthing, until they drop the purse of selfishness with all the dross that is in it, and rush home to the Father and the Son … I believe that no hell will be lacking which would help the just mercy of God to redeem his children”; “I believe that Jesus Christ is our atonement; that through him we are reconciled to, made one with God. There is not one word in the New Testament about reconciling God to us; it is we that have to be reconciled to God”; and, to those who accused him of denying the atonement, “I believe in the atonement … In what you call the atonement, in what you mean by the word … I do not believe.” “Righteousness” adds the verdict on imputation: “Believe in Moloch if you will, but call him Moloch, not Justice.” Salvation is from sin, not from its consequences: “Jesus did not die to save us from punishment; he was called Jesus because he should save his people from their sins”; “No soul is saved that would not prefer hell to sin.”22
Hell is thus retained, purified and relocated. “The Last Farthing” (on Matthew 5:26) defines the prison — “the one thing we know about that prison is, that its doors do not open until entire satisfaction is rendered, the last farthing paid” — and imagines its darkness as absolute solitude: “The man wakes from the final struggle of death, in absolute loneliness … no sign of God anywhere”; “It is the vast outside; the ghastly dark beyond the gates of the city of which God is the light — where the evil dogs go ranging, silent as the dark, for there is no sound any more than sight.” Yet “if a being be capable of self-disgust, is there not some room for hope”, and “Out of the abyss into which he cast himself, refusing to be the heir of God, he must rise and be raised.” “There is no heaven with a little of hell in it — no plan to retain this or that of the devil in our hearts or our pockets. Out Satan must go, every hair and feather!” “Love Thine Enemy” applies the same law to the unforgiving, who “shalt come out when thou hast paid the uttermost farthing; when thou hast learned of God in hell what thou didst refuse to learn of him upon the gentle-toned earth”; and “The Fear of God” gives the physics of the fire, which “is only at a distance it burns — that the farther from him, it burns the worse, and that when we turn and begin to approach him, the burning begins to change to comfort”. Adam in Lilith supplies the metaphysic: “Annihilation itself is no death to evil. Only good where evil was, is evil dead. An evil thing must live with its evil until it chooses to be good. That alone is the slaying of evil.”23
Whether MacDonald was a universalist is a question he refused to answer in the form in which it was put. He never wrote “all will be saved”; he disliked the word “Universalist” because he associated it with the denial of punishment and repentance, and Greville believed that Lilith was written “in view of the increasingly easy tendencies in universalists, who, because they had now discarded everlasting retribution as a popular superstition, were dismissing hell-fire altogether, and with it the need for repentance”. Reports of his lectures preserve the shape of the hope: in 1887, “I believe His Spirit will reach every heart; it may be thousands of years hence before it all happens”; in 1890, “I do indeed believe in a place of punishment … but that longing and pain will bring us back to God.” His universalism, if the word is used, is that of Gregory of Nyssa rather than of the nineteenth-century Universalist churches: a hope grounded in the character of God and the remedial nature of every hell, not a doctrine of automatic salvation. It extends beyond the human race. “The Hope of the Universe” (on Romans 8:19) argues that “the word creature or creation must include everything in creation that has sentient life”; that to believe God “made many of the lower creatures merely for prey, or to be the slaves of a slave … is to believe in a God who, so far as one portion at least of his creation is concerned, is a demon”; that “I know of no reason why I should not look for the animals to rise again, in the same sense in which I hope myself to rise again … Love is the one bond of the universe … if animals can be loved, they are loveable; if they can love, they are yet more plainly loveable: love is eternal; how then should its object perish?”; that “Their immortality is no new faith with me, but as old as my childhood”; and that “When the sons, then, are free, when their bodies are redeemed, they will lift up with them the lower creation into their liberty … Ah, what horses! Ah, what dogs! Ah, what wild beasts, and what birds in the air! The whole redeemed creation goes to make up St Paul’s heaven.” The same sermon is MacDonald’s attack on vivisection: “The tree of knowledge will never prove to man the tree of life. There is no law says, Thou shalt know; a thousand laws cry out, Thou shalt do right.” In Lilith the reach of the hope is tested on its hardest case: Lilith is brought, after ages, to open her hand and sleep, and even the great Shadow is left within the field of “Good and not Evil is the Universe. The battle between them may last for countless ages, but it must end.”24
Death as More Life; the Dead and the Inner Vision#
“Life is the only reality; what men call death is but a shadow”; “With Him death is not … This that we call death, is but a form in the eyes of men”; “God is being; death is nowhere!” The formula the fiction gives it is the Old Man of the Sea’s in “The Golden Key”: “‘You have tasted of death now,’ said the Old Man. ‘Is it good?’ ‘It is good,’ said Mossy. ‘It is better than life.’ ‘No,’ said the Old Man, ‘it is only more life.’” Phantastes ends in a coffin from which Anodos speaks — “I was dead, and right content” — and with the assurance that “good is always coming; though few have at all times the simplicity and the courage to believe it”; Lilith is the story of a man who refuses for four hundred pages to lie down in the house of death and is told, “you will be dead, so long as you refuse to die.” In the sermons the resurrection body is “the same body, glorified as we are glorified, with all that was distinctive of each from his fellows more visible”, since “we need not only a body to convey revelation to us, but a body to reveal us to others”; heaven is “continuous touch with God”, and one of its promises is that we shall be able to say to one another, “I am sorry; forgive me.” The letters to the Mount-Temples after the deaths of Mary and Maurice keep the same note without any concession to the séance: “How real death makes things look! And how we learn to cleave to the one shining fact … that Jesus did rise radiant!”; “This world … is the porch to the Father’s home.” Glenn Sadler’s summary is exact: for MacDonald death was “the everyday experience of changing one’s clothes and being taken like a little child to bed” — the image of North Wind carrying Diamond, and of the tombstone in The Flight of the Shadow: “HERE LIE THE DISUSED GARMENTS … THEY ARE NOT HERE; THEY ARE RISEN.”25
The dead are near, and MacDonald believed that some of the living see them. The Portent (1860/1864) is subtitled “A Story of the Inner Vision of the Highlanders, Commonly Called the Second Sight”; Duncan the blind piper in Malcolm, Rob of the Angels in What’s Mine’s Mine, Ericson on the bridge in Robert Falconer, and Janet Grant in her old age all have “the sight”; Wilfrid Cumbermede records, in Job’s words, the felt presence of his dead friend; Ian Macruadh lives in habitual consciousness of the dead (“The ghosts are not dead … I am inclined to think some ghosts have to stay a while and look on”). Greville reports his father’s reluctant admission that he had “himself no trace” of the gift, and MacDonald’s dedication of The Portent apologises to a Highland friend for the “degenerate embodiment given to the ancient belief”. What matters for his thought is that he treats the second sight as a natural, God-given extension of vision, never as a technique to be acquired, and that he draws a firm line between it and the manufactured phenomena of the séance-room. The prayers of the living reach the dead — “Death is not an impervious wall; through it, beyond it, go the prayers. It is possible we may have some to help in the next world because we have prayed for them in this” — but the dead are not to be summoned. Donal Grant’s “talk about ghosts” concludes that necromancy could at best raise “a shadowy resemblance”; the ghost-music in Castle Graham is an aeolian harp in a chimney and is not the less a revelation for that.26
The Imagination and the Fairy Tale#
“The Imagination: Its Functions and Its Culture” (1867) is the theoretical centre of MacDonald’s work and the most influential Anglophone statement of the Romantic theory of Märchen. Its thesis is a single sentence: “The imagination of man is made in the image of the imagination of God.” The faculty is defined as “that faculty which gives form to thought — not necessarily uttered form, but form capable of being uttered in shape or in sound, or in any mode upon which the senses can lay hold. It is, therefore, that faculty in man which is likest to the prime operation of the power of God, and has, therefore, been called the creative faculty”; but “between creator and poet lies the one unpassable gulf”, and the word creation should be kept “for that calling out of nothing which is the imagination of God”. God’s imagination makes not works but makers: “where a man would make a machine, or a picture, or a book, God makes the man that makes the book … Would God give us a drama? He makes a Shakespere … All the processes of the ages are God’s science; all the flow of history is his poetry … Man is but a thought of God.” The human imagination is receptive before it is active — “a man is rather being thought than thinking, when a new thought arises in his mind” — and its forms are given it by nature, “an outward figuration of the condition of his mind; an inexhaustible storehouse of forms whence he may choose exponents”; “The man has but to light the lamp within the form: his imagination is the light, it is not the form.” From this follows the theory of language (“The half of our language is the work of the imagination”; “the world is — allow us the homely figure — the human being turned inside out. All that moves in the mind is symbolized in Nature”), the theory of science (“Every experiment has its origin in hypothesis … The man who cannot invent will never discover”; “we dare to claim for the true, childlike, humble imagination, such an inward oneness with the laws of the universe that it possesses in itself an insight into the very nature of things”), and the ethics of culture: “the first and essential means for its culture must be an ordering of our life towards harmony with its ideal in the mind of God … nothing will do so much for the intellect or the imagination as being good”; “a wise imagination, which is the presence of the spirit of God, is the best guide that man or woman can have”; “Seek not that your sons and your daughters should not see visions, should not dream dreams; seek that they should see true visions, that they should dream noble dreams.” To those who feared the faculty he answered, “It is more religion we want. It is more imagination we need”; and the essay closes with Bacon’s gloss on Solomon, that “the Divine Majesty took delight to hide his works, to the end to have them found out; and as if kings could not obtain a greater honour than to be God’s playfellows in that game.”27
“The Fantastic Imagination” (1893), written as a preface to the American edition of the fairy tales in answer to readers who asked what they meant, is the theory of the invented world. “That we have in English no word corresponding to the German Mährchen, drives us to use the word Fairytale, regardless of the fact that the tale may have nothing to do with any sort of fairy”; asked what a fairytale is, “I should reply, Read Undine: that is a fairytale … of all fairytales I know, I think Undine the most beautiful.” A man “may, if he pleases, invent a little world of his own, with its own laws; for there is that in him which delights in calling up new forms — which is the nearest, perhaps, he can come to creation”; “The moment he forgets one of them, he makes the story, by its own postulates, incredible”; but “In the moral world it is different: there a man may clothe in new forms, and for this employ his imagination freely, but he must invent nothing … In physical things a man may invent; in moral things he must obey — and take their laws with him into his invented world as well”; “Law is the soil in which alone beauty will grow; beauty is the only stuff in which Truth can be clothed”. Against allegory: “A fairytale is not an allegory. There may be allegory in it, but it is not an allegory … An allegory must be Mastery or Moorditch.” On meaning: “It cannot help having some meaning; if it have proportion and harmony it has vitality, and vitality is truth”; “A genuine work of art must mean many things; the truer its art, the more things it will mean”; “Everyone, however, who feels the story, will read its meaning after his own nature and development”; “It is there not so much to convey a meaning as to wake a meaning”; “The true fairytale is, to my mind, very like the sonata”; “The best thing you can do for your fellow, next to rousing his conscience, is — not to give him things to think about, but to wake things up that are in him”; “One difference between God’s work and man’s is, that, while God’s work cannot mean more than he meant, man’s must mean more than he meant”; “A man may well himself discover truth in what he wrote; for he was dealing all the time with things that came from thoughts beyond his own.” And the refusal to explain: “The tale is there, not to hide, but to show: if it show nothing at your window, do not open your door to it … To ask me to explain, is to say, ‘Roses! Boil them, or we won’t have them!’ My tales may not be roses, but I will not boil them.” The distinction between an imagination that embodies “old truths” in “new forms” and a fancy that merely invents is Coleridge’s, though MacDonald never uses Coleridge’s terms; his insistence that the human faculty is “made in the image” of the divine is a theological restatement of the Biographia’s “repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation”. Novalis is quoted for the rest: “The imagination is the stuff of the intellect.”28
Nature as the Thought of God: Correspondence and Christian Platonism#
The lecture on Wordsworth in A Dish of Orts states the natural theology in MacDonald’s own terms. “The very element in which the mind of Wordsworth lived and moved was a Christian pantheism … This world is not merely a thing which God hath made, subjecting it to laws; but it is an expression of the thought, the feeling, the heart of God himself … This Christian pantheism, this belief that God is in everything, and showing himself in everything, has been much brought to the light by the poets of the past generation.” Paley’s watchmaker proves “A mechanical God, and nothing more”; “To the man of God, all nature will be but changeful reflections of the face of God”; “If the world proceeded from the imagination of God, and man proceeded from the love of God, it is easy to believe that that which proceeded from the imagination of God should rouse the best thoughts in the mind of a being who proceeded from the love of God.” “The Truth” (on John 14:6) gives the Platonic form of the doctrine. Facts are not truths: “It is a small matter whether the water in my jug was frozen on such a morning … Is it a truth that water freezes at thirty-two degrees? I think not.” Nature’s laws “are the waving of his garments, waving so because he is thinking and loving and walking inside them”; “The idea of God is the flower; his idea is not the botany of the flower”; “The truth of the flower is, not the facts about it, be they correct as ideal science itself, but the shining, glowing, gladdening, patient thing throned on its stalk”; “The truth of a thing, then, is the blossom of it, the thing it is made for, the topmost stone set on with rejoicing”; “human science is but the backward undoing of the tapestry-web of God’s science, works with its back to him … Analysis is well, as death is well; analysis is death, not life”; and Jesus is the truth as “the live Truth … the flower of his sonship which is his nature”. Nature, in the essay on the imagination, was “called into being … to furnish forms for truths, for without form truth cannot be uttered”: this is the doctrine of correspondence, and MacDonald knew where it came from. In England’s Antiphon he wrote of the mystical school of Herbert, Vaughan and More that “They use the largest figures for the largest spiritual ideas — light for good, darkness for evil. Such symbols are the true bodies of the true ideas … Having found their symbols, these writers next proceed to use them logically; and here begins the peculiar danger. When the logic leaves the poetry behind, it grows first presumptuous, then hard, then narrow and untrue to the original breadth of the symbol … Witness some of the writings of the European master of the order — Swedenborg: the highest of them are rich in truth; the lowest are poverty-stricken indeed.” Mr Graham in Malcolm, “without having read a word of Swedenborg”, is “a believer in the absolute correspondence of the inward and outward”; Greville remembered his father knowing “enough of Swedenborg’s teaching to feel the truth of correspondences, and would find innumerable instances of physical law tallying with metaphysical, of chemical affinities with spiritual affections”.29
The label that fits this is Christian Platonism, or, in the phrase of the scholarship, a “sacramental” Romantic Platonism, rather than Neoplatonism in the strict sense: MacDonald’s God is a personal Father who wills creation, not the One from which being emanates, and his “ideas” are the Father’s thoughts of individual creatures, each with its own name. Adelheid Kegler nevertheless reads him, with Emily Brontë, as working “within Neoplatonic philosophy”, the soul being “an intermediary in the whole of being”; Rolland Hein speaks of the “harmony within” and of a sacramental universe; Kerry Dearborn of a Trinitarian theology in which “the universe is sacramental” and “imagination is a characteristic of God”. The Miracles of Our Lord (1870) draws the consequence for the body: the miracles are “the works of the Father done in little”, “an epitome of God’s processes in nature beheld in immediate connection with their source”, and “material creation … is the great — suspect, the only miracle. But if matter be the outcome of spirit, and body and soul be one man, then, if the soul be radiant of truth, what can the body do but shine?” — hence the conjecture that a perfect soul “would be capable of keeping its body alive” and that the Transfiguration was “the visible outbreak of a life so strong as to be life-giving”. The same conviction underlies the sermon “The Mirrors of the Lord”, in which Paul’s “mysticism” is “the working of a poetic imagination divinely alive … to discover the same principle in things that look unlike”, and the mirror does not reflect but receives: “When we think Christ, Christ comes; when we receive his image into our spiritual mirror, he enters with it.”30
Sources: Boehme and Law, Novalis, Swedenborg, Blake, the Scottish Universalists, and Maurice#
The evidence for Boehme is Greville’s and MacDonald’s own. Law’s quarto edition of The Works of Jacob Behmen, the Teutonic Theosopher (1764–81) and “a very early Dutch edition of the Forty Questions” stood on the shelves at Bordighera; MacDonald “had some early knowledge of” Boehme, “if we may judge from David Elginbrod”, and “in later years we have some evidence of his returning”; he taught himself Dutch, Greville thought, to get nearer him; and “Certainly in Lilith, as in many other books, we may often suspect an understanding of ‘The Teutonic Philosopher’s’ thoughts, even if my father was not deeply versed in his works. What more like his faith than that inspired cobbler’s teaching that, however deep a man may be in Hell, he can never be outside God?” In David Elginbrod (1863) the peasant-saint keeps a first edition of the Aurora (1612) as an heirloom and one chapter carries an epigraph from “Jacob Behmen’s Aurora — Law’s Translation”; in Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood (1867) Ethelwyn is discovered reading “a volume of Jacob Behmen” and the vicar wants “the fourth plate in the third volume of Law’s ‘Behmen’” — one of the Freher figures; England’s Antiphon introduces John Byrom as “coming under the influence, probably through William Law, of the writings of Jacob Böhme, the marvellous shoemaker of Görlitz in Silesia”, and calls the mystical thinker “the reviver of religious poetry”; and the line of cobbler-mystics that runs from David Elginbrod through Andrew Comin in Donal Grant to the soutar of Salted with Fire is MacDonald’s homage to the shoemaker of Görlitz. Dale Nelson, who assembled the evidence, concluded that MacDonald was “not deeply versed” in Boehme, took no interest in the distinctively Boehmean doctrines of the Virgin Sophia and the androgyne, and received Boehme chiefly through William Law, the Cambridge Platonists, Novalis, Blake and Coleridge — “Law were at least as important a source of Boehme’s thought for MacDonald as Boehme’s own writings” — and that MacDonald’s hope for the salvation of all creatures, the devil included, “does not appear in Boehme”. Law’s Spirit of Prayer and Spirit of Love, with their “Christian pantheism”, their consuming fire that is the love of God and their wrath that is felt only by those who turn from it, are the probable channel; Lilith footnotes Law by name. Aren Roukema has read the Shadow of Anodos as the alchemical nigredo, “the black colour, representing death, which a substance takes on during transmutation”, and argued that MacDonald “must have encountered other alchemical texts as well”, Splendor Solis among them; the reading is suggestive rather than documented, and no lecture or letter by MacDonald on Boehme or on alchemy is known. His lectures were on Shakespeare, Burns, Dante, Milton, Wordsworth, Tennyson and “the Imagination”.31
Novalis is the German source he acknowledged most often: the twelve Spiritual Songs of 1851 were his first publication and, revised in Rampolli (1897), his last; the Hymns to the Night, on which he “bestowed twice the labour spent upon all the rest of the book together”, he was the first to render complete in English; the epigraph of Phantastes is Novalis’s fragment on the Märchen (“a fairy tale is like a dream-picture without coherence … the world of the fairy tale is that which is set over against the world of truth, and just therefore so thoroughly like it, as chaos is like the completed creation”), and the last words of Lilith are Novalis’s “Our life is no dream, but it should and will perhaps become one.” The unveiling of Isis from The Disciples at Sais — “Then lifted he the light, shining veil, and — Rosebud sank into his arms” — closes David Elginbrod and is painted by Lenorme in The Marquis of Lossie; the geometrical figures of the child in “The Golden Key” are footnoted to Novalis. From Novalis, and from Jean Paul, Schleiermacher, Fouqué, Hoffmann and Heine (the epigraphs of Phantastes name them all, beside Spenser, Fletcher, Dekker, Cowley, Sidney and Tourneur), came the night-mysticism, the beloved as “the sun of the Night”, death as second birth, and the conviction that “ethics and obedience” are the condition of knowledge. Coleridge and Wordsworth, on whom he lectured for forty years, gave the theory of imagination and the “Christian pantheism”; Blake, four of whose Grave illustrations hung in his study, gave him, Greville was sure, “the idea of the Cemetery in Lilith”, though “I have no reason for thinking that my father made any study of Blake’s prophetic books”; Dante, whose Vita Nuova sonnets he translated and whom he lectured on, gave the Earthly Paradise of At the Back of the North Wind and the purgatorial house of Mara; Spenser gave the title Phantastes (from the chamber of the mind in The Faerie Queene, II.ix); Hogg’s “Kilmeny” gave the other witness to the country at the back of the north wind. Swedenborg he read — references occur in Robert Falconer, Malcolm and The Marquis of Lossie, and John Smith in Adela Cathcart has “formed the Swedenborgian resolution of never growing old” — but the passage in England’s Antiphon quoted above is his considered judgement, and the claims sometimes made that his father-in-law or Lady Byron were Swedenborgians have no foundation: the Powells were Congregationalist leather merchants. The Swedenborgian element in his work, which Kegler has traced in the child-figures Diamond and Sir David and in the “extremities of invisible supernatural realities” of his castles, came to him as part of the furniture of his age — through Coleridge, Blake, Emerson, the Pre-Raphaelites and his friend Sutton — and not from a master.32
The theological sources were Scottish and English. Thomas Erskine of Linlathen (1788–1870), the lay theologian of The Unconditional Freeness of the Gospel (1828) and The Brazen Serpent (1831); John McLeod Campbell, deposed by the General Assembly in 1831 for teaching that Christ died for all; Alexander John Scott, deposed the same year and MacDonald’s revered friend; and Frederick Denison Maurice, whose Theological Essays (1853) cost him his King’s College chair for denying that “eternal” punishment was endless — these four, all of them in revolt against the federal Calvinism of the Westminster Confession, gave MacDonald his doctrine of Fatherhood, his rejection of penal substitution and his conviction that “the words life eternal in the New Testament bore no relation to time”. Scott “introduced him”, in Gisela Kreglinger’s phrase, “to figures like Thomas Erskine and F. D. Maurice”; Dearborn’s Baptized Imagination names Maurice, Erskine, Scott and Campbell as the British theologians behind his Trinitarian and anti-systematic theology. What none of them supplied, and what marks MacDonald off from the Broad Church, is the marriage of this theology to the Romantic-Boehmean vision of nature and imagination: the consuming fire of Law joined to the Fatherhood of Maurice.33
Mesmerism, Spiritualism, and the Occult: The Tested Border#
MacDonald did not write about the occult from hearsay. He had attended the lectures of the mesmerist Zamoiski at Hastings; he had sat in the houses where mediums performed and had watched Ruskin convinced; he wrote of ghosts, second sight, somnambulism, wraiths, haunted chambers, wizards’ rooms, philtres and mirrors in book after book; and in David Elginbrod he made the mesmerist-spiritualist Funkelstein the villain of his first novel. The verdict of that novel, given in its chapter titles — “Materialism alias Ghost-Hunting”, “More Materialism and Some Spiritualism”, “Spirit versus Materialism” — is that the phenomena are real enough and wholly beside the point, and that the séance and the mesmeric trance are materialism in disguise: an attempt to grasp spirit as a thing and to seize by technique what is given only to obedience. Robert Falconer’s account of the mesmerist’s power is MacDonald’s own: the operator “is able, by some mysterious sympathy, to produce in the mind of the patient such forceful impulses to do whatever he wills”; the victim would be “a creature of his imagination … as much as any character invented … by the mind of the poet”; “Imagine being forced to think another man’s thoughts! That would be possession indeed! And this is not far removed from the old stories about the demons entering into a man.” Falconer refuses to use the power even to save Euphra — “I dare not exercise a power which itself I do not understand” — and the narrator speaks of the “vague fear, vague wonder, and a certain indescribable oppression” of the séance that “dimmed all the clearer vision”. The witch Watho in “The History of Photogen and Nycteris” “desired to know everything … She cared for nothing in itself — only for knowing it”; the “wolf in her mind” is the will to know without love, and it destroys her. Against this MacDonald set the “inner vision” of the Highlanders, the God-given dream, the “wise imagination”, and the ghostly that is real because it is moral: the Shadows who “mostly want to make people silent and thoughtful; to awe them a little”, the aeolian music that leads Donal to the walled-up chapel, the dream by which Wilfrid finds the register, and the great Shadow of Lilith who has “no thick to him”. His friendship with the Cowper-Temples, who “mixed with leading spiritualist figures” and attended séances, never drew him in; the surviving letters to them speak of the dead only in the language of the resurrection; and the poem of 1878 to his wife, refusing “pleasant fancies of a half-held creed”, is the private confirmation of the public position. Theosophy, the Society for Psychical Research and the occult revival of the 1880s leave no trace in his published books or in the family record.34
The Divine Feminine#
The wisdom-figures of MacDonald’s fantasy are women, ancient and beautiful, who appear now old, now young, now as a servant, now as “a Titaness”: the woman with young eyes in the four-doored cottage of Phantastes; the Grandmother of “The Golden Key”, “thousands of years old”, who has “no time to grow old”; North Wind, who is also “Bad Fortune”, “Evil Chance”, “Ruin” and one name she will not tell; the great-great-grandmother Irene, “the Mistress of the Silver Moon”, whose fire of roses burns Curdie’s hands clean and who lifts the king “as if he were but a little child, to her bosom”; the Wise Woman who shows Rosamond herself in a mirror and carries her away in her cloak; Eve, “the lady of the New Jerusalem”, ministering in the house of the dead, and Mara, “the Lady of Sorrow”, in whose house Lilith is burned by the worm of her own self-knowledge. Their demonic counter-image is Lilith herself, Adam’s first wife, “queen of Hell, and mistress of the worlds”, who “counted it slavery to be one with me, and bear children for Him who gave her being”. MacDonald never theorised these figures; the Grandmother’s “Shapes are only dresses, Curdie, and dresses are only names. That which is inside is the same all the time” is as near as he comes, and it is a doctrine of the One behind the many rather than of a goddess. Bonnie Gaarden’s The Christian Goddess (2011) reads them through Jung and the biblical Sophia tradition as four archetypes — Great Mother, Terrible Mother, Soulmaker, Muse — embodying MacDonald’s universalism and panentheism; Kegler speaks of a “Sophianic mysticism, nourished by Boehme and Swedenborg”; Nelson, more cautiously, found that MacDonald rejected the Boehmean Sophia as a doctrine while keeping her as a figure. The strong sisters and mothers of the realistic novels — Margaret Elginbrod, Annie Anderson, Janet Grant, Kirsty Barclay, Mary Marston — are the same figure in prose, and MacDonald’s essay “A Sketch of Individual Development” (1880) gives the psychology: to the infant “the sky over him is his mother’s face; the earth that nourishes him is his mother’s bosom … There is no type so near the highest idea of relation to a God, as that of the child to his mother. Her face is God, her bosom Nature, her arms are Providence.”35
Naming the Position#
MacDonald is best described as a Christian universalist in hope and a Romantic Platonist of the will, standing in the lineage Boehme–Law–Novalis–Coleridge and Erskine–Scott–Maurice, on the texts John 1:3–4, John 14:6, Romans 8:19–22, Hebrews 12:29 and Revelation 2:17, and on the Sermon on the Mount. He was not an occultist, not a Swedenborgian, not a spiritualist, not a Theosophist; he distrusted “theory”, refused labels, and located religious knowledge in obedience rather than in any gnosis — “Obedience alone can convince. To convince without obedience I would take no bootless labour; it would be but a gain for hell.” His “mysticism”, the word that Chesterton, Hein, Kegler and Gaarden all use, is a mysticism of the sacramental universe and of the will, not of technique or secret doctrine; Chesterton’s phrase for the “optimistic theism” he had learned from it was that “Its Universalism was a sort of optimistic Calvinism”, and his own summary of MacDonald was that his father “said things that were like the Cavalier mystics, like the Catholic saints, sometimes perhaps like the Platonists or the Swedenborgians, but not in the least like the Calvinists”. His points of contact with the esoteric currents are four: the Boehmean-Law substratum of his doctrines of the consuming fire and of nature as signature; the Romantic theory of imagination as a divine faculty and of the fairy tale as a form that “wakes” rather than “conveys” meaning; the use of the Lilith legend, the second sight, the dream-vision and the alchemical shadow as vehicles of an anti-Calvinist soteriology; and the transmission of all this to Lewis, Tolkien’s circle and the mythopoeic fiction of the twentieth century.36
Works#
MacDonald published some fifty volumes in forty-three years. They are treated here in four groups — the poetry and translations, the fantasies and fairy tales, the realistic novels, and the sermons, criticism and essays — and in order of publication within each group, since the fantasies form a single continuous argument from Phantastes to Lilith that a strict chronology would scatter among thirty novels. First editions are given with place, publisher and year; quotations are from the first editions where these could be consulted and otherwise from the standard reprints, and are cited by chapter, sermon or poem.37
Poetry and Translations#
Twelve of the Spiritual Songs of Novalis (1851)#
At a glance. A pamphlet privately printed at Arundel for Christmas 1851 and given to friends: twelve of the fifteen Geistliche Lieder of Friedrich von Hardenberg, “Novalis” (1772–1801), in rhymed English verse. MacDonald’s first publication, and the one Greville believed had earned him the charge of “German theology” at Arundel. The full fifteen appeared in Exotics (1876) and, revised, in Rampolli (1897); which twelve were printed in 1851, and whether the pamphlet carried a preface, are not recorded. The fifth song — “If I him but have, / If he be but mine, / If my heart, hence to the grave, / Ne’er forgets his love divine — / Know I nought of sadness, / Feel I nought but worship, love, and gladness” — carries in Rampolli the translator’s note that the double rhyme of the original was “impossible without the loss of the far more precious simplicity”, and the fifteenth is the hymn to Mary, “In countless pictures I behold thee”. Novalis is the German poet MacDonald returned to most often, and the Songs are the seed of his own mysticism of death, of the night that is “the mother of vision”, and of the beloved as “the sun of the Night”.38
Within and Without: A Dramatic Poem (1855)#
At a glance. London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1855; “Written December and January, 1850–51”, according to the note beneath the title in the Poetical Works; epigraph from Sidney’s Arcadia (“What life it is, and how that all these lives do gather — / With outward maker’s force, or like an inward father”); dedicated in a sonnet “To L.P.M.D.”, dated May 1855, which tells its own story — “for forty days — / Weary with sickness and with social haze … I took my ways / Into a solitude, Invention’s mine; / There thought and wrote”. Five parts, each prefaced by a sonnet of counsel to the soul, in blank verse with songs and one prose tale; the fifth part is headed “A Dream”. The book won Tennyson’s notice and the “intense admiration” of Lady Byron, through whom, on the evidence of her biographer, “their acquaintance began”.39
Plot. Julian, an Italian nobleman turned monk, sits in his cell at sunset: “So lies my journey — on into the dark! … I am as a child new-born, its mother dead, / Its father far away beyond the seas. / Blindly I stretch my arms and seek for him: / He goeth by me, and I see him not.” He had once felt, wandering “between the silent meadows and the stars”, as if “within my soul … An eye was opened; but I knew not whether / ’Twas I that saw, or God that looked on me”, and “came here at last to search for God”; the monks think him an atheist, and the Abbot covets his fortune. Warned by his friend Brother Robert, he escapes, praying on the road that God will let “thy own design in me work on, / Unfolding the ideal man in me … For thy Idea, gifted with a self, / Must be of one with the mind where it sprang, / And fit to talk with thee about thy thoughts.” In Part II he learns that his beloved Lilia’s father has been imprisoned by the Count Nembroni, who wanted Lilia; he kills the count in a thunderstorm as he forces himself upon her, carries her off, confesses his monkhood (“Such penance as the saints of old inflicted / Upon their quivering flesh. Folly, I know”) and flees with her by boat: “My beautiful! my bride! my spirit’s wife! / God-given, and God-restored!” Part III, five years later in London, finds them poor: Julian a clerk reading to his child Lily the tale of the Singer who must live his own song; Lilia, her beauty fading, teaching Lord Seaford’s daughter. In Part IV Seaford’s attentions and Lilia’s momentary response (“O fool! to know thee once, and, after years, / To take a gleaming marsh-light for thy lamp!”) drive her to leave: “I will find / A quiet place where I will seek thy God. / And … there are other worlds / Where all gone wrong in this may be set right.” Julian, in a churchyard, blames himself — “A deed of love / Is stronger than a metaphysic truth; / Smiles better teachers are than mightiest words” — and the child dies: “Thy truer Father took thee home to him, / That he might grant my prayer, and save my wife.” Julian returns to the empty room to die, singing the boat-song. Part V is the dream: the dead child leads her father (“O father, come with me! I have found her — mother!”); an angel guarding Lilia at prayer yields to Julian — “Thy ministry is stronger far than mine”; Julian on a mountain among the stars: “And thou wast with me all the time, my God, / Even as now! I was not far from thee … Thou art all in all. / I am not mine, but thine”; Lilia rises from “the fog-sea below … Where human souls are vexed in awful dreams”, the child insisting “She must climb and come”; “the three are clasped in an infinite embrace”, and “the poet awakes from his dream.”
Major themes and takeaway. The search for God through the world rather than the cloister; the Father who works out “the ideal man” in his child; need as the bond that “holds / Thy being yet to mine”; death as “second birth / Into the spirit-world”; a purgatorial after-life in which the erring soul must climb. The debts are to Faust (the monk who leaves his cell “into the dark”), to Shelley’s aerial ascents, and to Browning’s Pauline, which the Dictionary of National Biography thought the poem recalled “though without Browning’s obscurity”. Its theology is already the mature one; and its prefatory sonnets — “Go thou into thy closet; shut thy door; / And pray to Him in secret … But think not thou, by one wild bound, to clear / The numberless ascensions, more and more, / Of starry stairs that must be climbed” — give the image of the stair that MacDonald’s fantasy would climb for forty years.40
Poems (1857) and The Disciple and Other Poems (1867)#
At a glance. Poems. London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, & Roberts, 1857; dedicated in two sonnets “To My Father”, signed “G.M.D. Jr. Algiers, April, 1857”; reissued in 1864 as A Hidden Life and Other Poems. The Disciple and Other Poems. London: Strahan, 1867 (some copies dated 1868), grouped as The Disciple, Songs of the Days and Nights, Parables, Roadside Poems, Organ Songs, Violin Songs, For Children, Ballads, Scotch Songs and Ballads.
The poems. The sonnets to his father are the source of the theology of Fatherhood in MacDonald’s own account: “Yet most I thank thee, not for any deed, / But for the sense thy living self did breed / That fatherhood is at the great world’s core”; and, “So I beheld my God, in childhood’s morn, / A mist, a darkness, great, and far apart, / Moveless and dim — I scarce could say Thou art: / My manhood came, of joy and sadness born — / Full soon the misty dark, asunder torn, / Revealed man’s glory, God’s great human heart.” “A Hidden Life”, the blank-verse narrative that opens the 1857 volume, is the story of a Scottish farmer’s son who lifts a fallen lady to her horse on the morning of his first ploughing, goes to college, returns to the plough, lives a life of hidden thought and dies young of consumption, leaving her a letter “dated / From the churchyard”; his last prayer is MacDonald’s doctrine of the individual as God’s idea: “Make me content to be a primrose-flower / Among thy nations, so the fair truth, hid / In the sweet primrose, come awake in me, / And I rejoice, an individual soul, / Reflecting thee.” The “Eighteen Sonnets About Jesus” (later “Concerning Jesus”) present “The ideal Man, with the eternal eyes”, the “human, subject God”, whose “body is the shining veil / By which I look on God”, and whose praise “was not that thou didst know, or feel, / Or show, or love, but that thou didst the truth”. “Light”, dedicated to A. J. Scott, addresses the “First-born of the creating Voice! / Minister of God’s Spirit … Thou garment of the Invisible, whose skirt / Sweeps, glory-giving, over earth and heaven!” “The Disciple”, the thirty-two-section title poem of 1867, is MacDonald’s spiritual autobiography in ballad quatrains: a youth who cannot love the heaven of his upbringing (“I do not care for singing psalms; / I tire of good men’s talk”), who sees in the Calvinist Christ “A sad worn man who bows his face, / And treads a frightful path, / To save an abject hopeless race / From an eternal wrath”, and cries “If such thou art, O Jove, I go / To the Promethean Christ!”; who refuses a salvation that leaves his brothers out (“I pray, put me not in good case / Where others lack and pine”) and any creed-test (“I at his feet a heart would lay, / Not shoulders for a yoke”); and whose deliverance is the discovery of obedience: “‘Of me that man the truth shall know / Who wills the Father’s will’ … I need not search the sacred book / To find my duty clear; / Scarce in my bosom need I look, / It lies so very near.” Reading the gospel again he finds “A gracious, simple, truthful man … Obedience his one thought”, and ends, years later by the sea: “The man that feareth, Lord, to doubt, / In that fear doubteth thee.” The “Parables” of the same volume include “The Golden Key” in verse and “Somnium Mystici: A Microcosm in Terza Rima”, a dream-vision of the soul’s death and after-life (“And when I saw the countenance, I knew / That I was lying in my chamber dead”).41
Exotics (1876), A Threefold Cord (1883), The Poetical Works (1893) and Rampolli (1897)#
At a glance. Exotics: A Translation of the Spiritual Songs of Novalis, the Hymn-book of Luther, and other Poems from the German and Italian. London: Strahan, 1876; with a prefatory note “To my Friends”. A Threefold Cord: Poems by Three Friends. Privately printed, 1883: poems by MacDonald, his dead brother John Hill MacDonald and his friend Greville Matheson, without attribution, dedicated to Greville MacDonald from Casa Coraggio, May 1883 (“Let this man be the fourth with us, I pray”). The Poetical Works of George MacDonald, 2 vols. London: Chatto & Windus, 1893: MacDonald’s final revision and arrangement of the poems, with much previously unpublished; the Scots songs were also issued separately (Aberdeen: John Rae Smith, 1893). Rampolli: Growths from a Long-Planted Root; being Translations, new and old, chiefly from the German; along with A Year’s Diary of an Old Soul. London: Longmans, Green, 1897 (“rampolli” are shoots or scions).
Contents and takeaway. Rampolli is the fullest documentation of MacDonald’s German Romantic and mystical lineage. Its “Preface to the Translations” lays down five rules — the spirit first, then “each individual meaning”, then “the aroma of the poet’s style”, then “both rhythm and rime”, then literalness — and admits that “translation is but a continuous effort after the impossible … in the whole range of speech there is no such thing as a synonym.” It contains the first complete English version of Novalis’s Hymns to the Night (“Aside I turn to the holy, unspeakable, mysterious Night … More heavenly than those glittering stars we hold the eternal eyes which the Night hath opened within us”; “Endless is the duration of sleep. Holy Sleep, gladden not too seldom in this earthly day-labour, the devoted servant of the Night”), the fifteen Spiritual Songs, the parable of Hyacinth and Rosebud from The Disciples at Sais (the unveiling of the goddess at Sais), Schiller’s “Words of Faith”, “The Diver” and “Knight Toggenburg”, Goethe’s “Poems are painted window-panes”, Uhland’s “The Lost Church” (“Once full of pilgrims was the path — / Now where to find it, no one knoweth”), Heine, Claudius, Petrarch, Milton’s Italian poems, Luther’s whole hymn-book and an anonymous “Song of the Lonely” (“I am homesick, Lord of splendour!”), together with the entire Diary of an Old Soul. The Poetical Works gathers the shorter religious lyrics in which MacDonald’s mysticism is most concentrated: “Lost and Found” (“I found him nearest when I missed him most; / I found him in my heart, a life in frost, / A light I knew not till my soul was dark”); “That Holy Thing” (“Thou com’st down thine own secret stair: / Com’st down to answer all my need, / Yea, every bygone prayer!”); “The Sweeper of the Floor”, in which a woman sweeping a cathedral is told “Daughter … thou sweepest well my floor!” — “It is the Lord! I cried, and saw no more”; “Obedience” (“Trust him when the way is rough, / Cry not yet, It is enough! / But obey with true endeavour, / Else the salt hath lost his savour”); “The Carpenter” (“Come in, O gracious Force, I cry — / O workman, share my shed of clay”); “Come to Me” (“Let the trees mean thee, and the grassy sod, / And the water and the air!”); the children’s “Baby” from At the Back of the North Wind (“Where did you come from, baby dear? / Out of the everywhere into here”); and “The Shortest and Sweetest of Songs”, which is two words long: “Come / Home.”42
A Book of Strife in the Form of the Diary of an Old Soul (1880)#
At a glance. Privately printed, 1880; later issued by Longmans, Green, and reprinted with Rampolli in 1897 as “A Year’s Diary of an Old Soul”. Three hundred and sixty-six seven-line stanzas, one for each day of the year including 29 February, usually rhymed ababbcc, printed each opposite a blank page, as the dedication explains: “Sweet friends, receive my offering. You will find / Against each worded page a white page set: — / This is the mirror of each friendly mind / Reflecting that. In this book we are met … Let your white page be ground, my print be seed, / Growing to golden ears, that faith and hope shall feed. YOUR OLD SOUL.” Ruskin praised it from the chair at Oxford in 1884; the Dictionary of National Biography thought it “must rank with the best work of Crashaw and Vaughan”.43
Argument. The “strife” is the daily struggle of an ageing soul — MacDonald was fifty-five, and had buried two children in the two preceding years — towards God, conducted entirely as prayer; and the constants are those of the sermons. The Father as the spring of the self: “Thou art my life — I the brook, thou the spring. / Because thine eyes are open, I can see; / Because thou art thyself, ’tis therefore I am me” (16 January). Obedience as the one door: “Thy doors are deeds; the handles are their doing. / He whose day-life is obedient righteousness … He finds thee, Lord, at length, in his own common room” (16 May); “I search my heart — I search, and find no faith … No good seems likely. To and fro I am hurled. / I have no stay. Only obedience holds: — / I haste, I rise, I do the thing he saith” (9 February). The death of the evil self: “Lord of essential life, help me to die. / To will to die is one with highest life, / The mightiest act that to Will’s hand doth lie — / Born of God’s essence, and of man’s hard strife: / God, give me strength my evil self to kill, / And die into the heaven of thy pure will” (26 March). The Ancient of Days and “the eternal youth of thee”, who burns the old age off the soul: “O Life, burn at this feeble shell of me, / Till I the sore singed garment off shall push, / Flap out my Psyche wings, and to thee rush” (10 March). The theodicy: “Thou workest perfectly. And if it seem / Some things are not so well, ’tis but because / They are too loving-deep, too lofty-wise, / For me, poor child, to understand their laws … Thy good embraces ill, and lo! its illness dies!” (5 October). The patience of the making: “What if it take a thousand years to make me, / So me he leave not, angry, on the floor! — / Nay, thou art never angry! — that would break me!” (12 October). The knowing that is not-knowing: “I know thee, knowing that I do not know thee, / Nor ever shall till one with me I know thee — / Even as thy son, the eternal man, doth know thee” (20 November). And the restoration: “By love doth love grow mighty in its love: / Once thou shalt love us, child, as we love thee. / Father of loves, is it not thy decree / That, by our long, far-wandering remove / From thee, our life, our home, our being blest, / We learn at last to love thee true and best, / And rush with all our loves back to thy infinite rest?” (30 November). The year ends with a charge to his children: “Go, my beloved children, live your life. / Wounded, faint, bleeding, never yield the strife … Beyond morass and mountain swells the star / Of perfect love — the home of longing heart and brain” (31 December).
Takeaway. The Diary is the devotional form of the whole system — Fatherhood, obedience, the death of the self, the fire, the restoration — and the book in which MacDonald’s refusal to “speculate how” is most complete: “Come to me, Lord: I will not speculate how, / Nor think at which door I would have thee appear … But cry, ‘Come, Lord, come any way, come now’” (30 January).44
The Fantasies and Fairy Tales#
Phantastes: A Faerie Romance for Men and Women (1858)#
At a glance. London: Smith, Elder, 1858; no dedication. Two general epigraphs: Phineas Fletcher’s Purple Island (“Phantastes from ‘their fount’ all shapes deriving, / In new habiliments can quickly dight”) and, in German and untranslated, Novalis’s fragment on the Märchen: “A fairy tale is like a dream-picture without coherence, an ensemble of wonderful things and events, for instance a musical fantasy, the harmonic sequences of an aeolian harp, nature itself … The world of the fairy tale is the one set over against the world of truth, and just for that reason so wholly like it, as chaos is like the completed creation.” The title is the name of the chamber of imagination in the House of Alma in Spenser’s Faerie Queene (II.ix), and the later editions carry a motto: “In good sooth, my masters, this is no door. Yet is it a little window, that looketh upon a great world.” Twenty-five chapters, each with one or two epigraphs — Shelley’s Alastor, Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen (“‘Where is the stream?’ cried he, with tears. ‘Seest thou not its blue waves above us?’”), Henry Sutton, the ballads of Sir Aldingar and Sir Andrew Barton, Beddoes, Fouqué’s Zauberring, Goethe’s Mephistopheles (“I am a part of the part, which at first was the whole”), Coleridge’s “Dejection” (“O lady! we receive but what we give, / And in our life alone does nature live”), Wordsworth, Lyly, Schiller, Heine, Jean Paul’s Hesperus and Titan, Schleiermacher’s Monologen, Cowley, Fletcher, Spenser, Judges, Tourneur, Sidney, Dekker, Chaucer’s Pardoner and Novalis again: “Our life is no dream; but it ought to become one, and perhaps will.” Sales disappointed the publisher and pushed MacDonald towards the novel. Reissued in the 1870s; in 1905 Greville MacDonald, having bought the copyright and pulped an unauthorised illustrated edition, reissued it with thirty-three illustrations by Arthur Hughes, calling it the book that “rings with the dominant chord of his life’s purpose and work”; an Everyman’s Library edition (Dent, 1915) was the copy C. S. Lewis bought at Leatherhead station in March 1916.45
Plot. On the day after his twenty-first birthday Anodos (the name is Greek, “pathless” or “the way up”, according to which of two identical words is heard in it) opens with the keys his father has left him a hidden drawer in an old secretary and finds “a little heap of withered rose-leaves” and a small woman-form, “as if she had been a small Greek statuette roused to life”, who grows into “a tall, gracious lady, with pale face and large blue eyes” and refuses his touch: “I was two hundred and thirty-seven years old, last Midsummer eve; and a man must not fall in love with his grandmother, you know.” He has fairy blood on his great-grandmother’s side; “You shall find the way into Fairy Land to-morrow.” In the morning the carved ivy of his dressing-table is alive, the carpet is grass, a basin overflows into a stream, and he walks out into Fairy Land (I–II). A country maiden warns him: “Trust the Oak … but shun the Ash and the Alder; for the Ash is an ogre — you will know him by his thick fingers; and the Alder will smother you with her web of hair, if you let her near you at night” (III). In a cottage he reads of Sir Galahad and of the “damosel of the alder tree” who beguiled Sir Percivale; at night the flower-fairies mock him — “He has begun a story without a beginning, and it will never have any end” — the Ash’s thick-fingered hand pursues him, and the beech-tree woman shelters him and cuts her hair for a girdle of protection: “I may love him, I may love him; for he is a man, and I am only a beech-tree” (IV). In a cave of alabaster he sees a marble lady within the stone and sings her awake — “Hear thou the depths from which they call, / The voiceless longing of my heart” — and she bursts from the stone and flees: “found, freed, lost!” (V). A knight in rusty armour, “ashamed … to appear a knight, and in such a guise”, warns him, but the Maid of the Alder, beautiful before and “hollow deformity” behind, lulls him and delivers him to the Ash — “There he is; you can take him now” — and only the knight’s axe saves him (VI).
At the hut of the ogress, who reads from an ancient book that “as darkness had no beginning, neither will it ever have an end … Truly, man is but a passing flame, moving unquietly amid the surrounding rest of night”, Anodos disobeys her — “You had better not open that door” — opens a closet on to a passage of night-sky, and a dark figure runs to him: “It is only your shadow that has found you … Everybody’s shadow is ranging up and down looking for him. I believe you call it by a different name in your world” (VIII). The shadow withers grass and flowers, radiates “a dim shadow … as from a black sun”, and disenchants everything it touches: a fairy child’s two toys, the tube through which “the fairy-gifted poet looks when he beholds the same thing everywhere” and the tube that combines images, become “a multiplying-glass and a kaleidoscope” in the hands of “a commonplace boy”; a village’s faces distort; and a little maiden’s singing crystal globe, which the shadow prompts Anodos to grasp, is broken — “You have broken my globe; my globe is broken; ah, my globe!” (IX). In the fairy palace, where his chamber bears the inscription “The Chamber of Sir Anodos”, he reads in the library books that he lives as he reads — a planet where women have wings that “are but undeveloped arms” — and the tale of Cosmo von Wehrstahl of Prague (X–XIII). Cosmo, a poor noble student with Albertus Magnus and Cornelius Agrippa in a secret drawer, buys an antique mirror in which a lady appears each evening; with magic circle, brazier and incantation he compels her bodily presence, and she kneels: “Cosmo, if thou lovest me, set me free, even from thyself; break the mirror.” “Not yet pure in love, he hesitated” — then “I will not wait to be willing”, and shatters it. The Princess von Hohenweiss, whose stolen mirror it was, wakes crying “I am free! I am free! I thank thee!”; Cosmo, who has broken the mirror a second time in the house of the wicked von Steinwald, dies of his wound on the bridge over the Moldau, asking “Have I atoned at all? Do I love you a little — truly?” In the hall of black pedestals Anodos sings the marble lady into visibility, “in defiance of the law of the place” flings his arms round her, and she flees with “the reproachful cry, ‘You should not have touched me!’” — and, later, from a stone: “Ah! you should have sung to me; you should have sung to me!” (XIV–XVI).
Mocked by goblin-fairies underground, he throws himself into the sea and is carried in a boat to an island cottage, four-square with a door in every side, where an old woman with young eyes keeps a fire — “It is always day here, so long as I keep my fire burning” — and a red mark on her palm (XIX). Through her doors he passes into his own past (his father’s barn; the brother who drowned), into the “door of Sighs” where the lady receives the knight, now in polished armour — “O my beloved, thou art come, and I am blessed” — and into the “door of Dismay”; she fetches him back through the fourth, “the door of the Timeless”, and sings him the law of his cure: “Better to sit at the waters’ birth, / Than a sea of waves to win; / To live in the love that floweth forth, / Than the love that cometh in. / Be thy heart a well of love, my child, / Flowing, and free, and sure; / For a cistern of love, though undefiled, / Keeps not the spirit pure.” “Go, my son, and do something worth doing.” He joins two king’s sons who are forging armour to fight three giants; each kills a giant and the brothers die; and Anodos, carrying their bodies to the king, thinks “of myself … as side by side with Sir Galahad!” (XX–XXII). A knight who is his own likeness — “I saw the reflection of my countenance in the centre plate” — imprisons him in a tower with his shadow, from which he is freed by the singing of the maiden whose globe he broke: “Thou goest thine, and I go mine — / Many ways we wend; / Many days, and many ways, / Ending in one end.” He strips off his armour — “I am what I am, nothing more” — and learns “that it was not myself, but only my shadow, that I had lost … that he that will be a hero, will barely be a man; that he that will be nothing but a doer of his work, is sure of his manhood.” As the knight’s squire he comes to a forest temple where a white-robed multitude worships an enthroned figure and youths and girls are pushed through a door in its pedestal; the knight, “incapable of evil”, reveres; Anodos, in a borrowed white garment, hurls down “a great wooden image”, and “up out of it rushed a great brute, like a wolf, but twice the size”, which he throttles as it kills him: “I remember no blow. A faintness came over me, and my consciousness departed” (XXIII).
“I was dead, and right content. I lay in my coffin, with my hands folded in peace. The knight, and the lady I loved, wept over me.” “He has died well,” she says. Buried in the castle grounds, he enters a primrose she kisses — “the first kiss she had ever given me” — floats on a cloud, and finds that “now I could love without needing to be loved again … it is by loving, and not by being loved, that one can come nearest the soul of another”; “despair dies into infinite hope”; “I will be among you with the love that healeth.” He wakes on a hillside with a natural shadow. He has been gone twenty-one days: “To me it seemed twenty-one years.” “Thus I, who set out to find my Ideal, came back rejoicing that I had lost my Shadow.” The way back into the world of the door of Dismay “is through my tomb”; the beech-leaves whisper “A great good is coming — is coming — is coming to thee, Anodos”; and the book ends: “Yet I know that good is coming to me — that good is always coming; though few have at all times the simplicity and the courage to believe it. What we call evil, is the only and best shape, which, for the person and his condition at the time, could be assumed by the best good. And so, Farewell” (XXIV–XXV).46
Characters. Anodos: the young man of “fairy blood”, Everyman as Romantic egoist, whose quest for the Ideal is corrected into the loss of the Shadow. The grandmother in the secretary, the beech-woman, the old woman with the young eyes: three faces of the wise feminine, the last (in the four-doored cottage by the timeless sea, keeper of the fire, with the stigma on her palm) the first full statement of the figure who becomes the Grandmother of “The Golden Key” and Queen Irene. The marble lady (the Ideal, whom singing frees and touching loses) and the Maid of the Alder (the false Ideal, beautiful before and hollow behind). The Ash (the ogre with thick fingers) and the ogress with the book of darkness. The Shadow: pride, self-consciousness, the disenchanting eye. The knight of the rusty armour, who has been “befooled” by the Alder before Anodos and whose armour brightens as he does good: the man Anodos must become and whose squire he ends. Cosmo: Anodos’s double, the magician who learns that love must set free “even from thyself”. The maiden with the crystal globe, broken by his self-will and restored, as a singer, by her loss. The two brothers and the three giants: the chivalric episode in which he does something worth doing and takes credit for it. The knight who is his own likeness: the prison of the self.
Major themes. The quest for the Ideal corrected into the death of the self: “he that will be a hero, will barely be a man.” The shadow as disenchantment: the sight that makes toys of the poet’s instruments and commonplaces of faces. Love as outflow, not intake: “Be thy heart a well of love, my child.” Death as the condition of the healing love — the narrator speaks from the coffin. Good always coming: evil “the only and best shape … assumed by the best good”. The book as a way of life: Anodos becomes what he reads.
Esoteric symbolism. The romance is a Bildungsroman in the form of a dream and a descent-and-return; Wolff thought it a Freudian romance of the dead mother, and Fernando Soto has read it as a chthonic myth of the goddess’s rising. The Novalis epigraph declares its poetics, the Spenserian title its faculty psychology (the chamber of Phantastes). The mirror episode is the one place where MacDonald writes ceremonial magic — circle, brazier, incense, “a powerful incantation” and the grimoire authors Agrippa and Albertus — and he writes it to condemn it: the compelled presence is a bondage, and love’s act is to break the glass. The Shadow has been read by Roukema as the alchemical nigredo, the blackening through which the substance passes on its way to transmutation; the coffin, the primrose and the cloud are the albedo that follows. The tree-spirits and the flower-fairies are Fouqué’s and Paracelsus’s elementals domesticated; the old woman’s fire and her four doors (past, sighs, dismay, the timeless) are a Boehmean and Dantean purgatory; the forest temple’s wooden idol with the wolf inside is idolatry unmasked. Above all, the marble lady whom song frees and touch loses is the doctrine of “The New Name”: the beloved as God’s idea, to be sung into being, not possessed.
Relation to other works. The Shadow returns in “The Shadows”, in the mirror-twin of The Flight of the Shadow and in the great Shadow of Lilith; the four-doored cottage becomes the round house of the Grandmother in “The Golden Key” and the cottage of the Wise Woman; the death-and-coffin ending becomes the “house of death” of Lilith, which reverses Phantastes by making a young man refuse for a whole book what Anodos accepts in a chapter. The Novalis motto of chapter XXV, “Our life is no dream; but it ought to become one, and perhaps will”, is the last sentence of Lilith.
Takeaway. Phantastes is the map of MacDonald’s whole system drawn before the sermons were written: a young man goes into the country of the imagination to find his Ideal and comes back having lost his Shadow, and learns on the way that the self must die, that love is a well and not a cistern, and that “good is always coming”. Lewis, reading it at seventeen, found in it “the bright shadow coming out of the book into the real world”, and the quality he later learned to call holiness.47
Adela Cathcart (1864) and The Portent (1864)#
At a glance. Adela Cathcart, 3 vols. London: Hurst & Blackett, 1864; dedicated to John Rutherfurd Russell, M.D.; motto from Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale. The Portent: A Story of the Inner Vision of the Highlanders, Commonly Called the Second Sight. London: Smith, Elder, 1864; first serialised in the Cornhill Magazine, May–July 1860 (for which MacDonald received £40, and £30 for the book copyright); the volume adds eleven chapters to the serial; dedicated, from Kensington in May 1864, “with the honour due to my father’s friend”, to Duncan McColl, R.N., of Huntly, in a letter that is MacDonald’s first defence of the romance: “It is a Romance. I am well aware that, with many readers, this epithet will be enough to ensure condemnation. But there ought to be a place for any story, which, although founded in the marvellous, is true to human nature and to itself. Truth to Humanity, and harmony within itself, are almost the sole unvarying essentials of a work of art. Even The Rime of the Ancient Mariner — than which what more marvellous? — is true in these respects”; and he apologises that “my early education was not Celtic enough” to give the second sight its proper Highland colour.48
Plot and frame of Adela Cathcart. The narrator, “John Smith”, a bachelor who has “formed the Swedenborgian resolution of never growing old”, spends Christmas with his old friend Colonel Cathcart, whose daughter Adela is sinking in a nameless depression. Smith prescribes a story club: the curate Ralph Armstrong, his brother the young doctor Harry Armstrong, the narrator and others read tales aloud — “The Light Princess”, “The Shadows”, “The Giant’s Heart”, “The Cruel Painter”, “The Broken Swords”, “The Castle”, “The Bell” and others — and Adela, listening, comes back to life and falls in love with Harry. The colonel forbids the match, is ruined by a speculation, suffers a stroke, is nursed by Harry and relents, “the old man holding a hand of each”. Smith declines to say what cured her — “Did you ever know anything whatever resulting from the operation of one separable cause? … the cure was effected mainly from within” — and the book closes with his dream of a pine-forest cemetery whose broken marble busts are restored by a tall guide with “an infinite future in his face”: “I will not say here whose face the face of my guide was like.” The frame is MacDonald’s first statement of the therapeutic theory of imagination: stories, told aloud among friends, “wake” a soul that argument cannot reach. Among its tales, “The Cruel Painter” is set in Prague in “the year 159–” and concerns the painter Teufelsbürst, who paints only torture and uses his daughter Lilith’s face in scenes of horror; his pupil Karl von Wolkenlicht feigns death by a potion and plays the vampire until the old man is shocked into humanity and paints “a portrait of Karl — a portrait without evil or suffering” — MacDonald’s first Lilith, and his first use of the vampire lore he would give to the “white leech” of the later romance. “The Castle: A Parable” is a house on a cliff of which “no one had ever seen the whole”, whose children discover rooms they never entered, rebel against an elder brother they think stern, and are met by the absent father among the trees: “We thank thee that we have a father, and not a maker; that thou hast begotten us, and not moulded us as images of clay … Only the heart of a father is able to create.” “The Bell” (“The Wow o’ Rivven”) is the story of a village idiot who imitates the bell of the ruined church of Ruthven — “Come hame, come hame!” — and of the girl Elsie who dies to answer it: “for the bell called them, and they obeyed.”49
Plot of The Portent. Duncan Campbell, son of a poor Argyll laird, hears on the mountain “the sound as of the iron-shod hoofs of a horse, in furious gallop” with “a certain tinkle, or clank … Like a horse galloping with a loose shoe”: the family portent, heard at his birth, when his mother died. His nurse Margaret tells the legend: two brothers, the younger with “superior and hidden knowledge”, loved the same orphan girl; the younger hurled the elder into a ravine; the lady died; and the phantom rider with the lady across his saddle and the broken shoe has haunted the family since — “What if my Duncan be the youth whom his wicked brother hurled into the ravine, come again in a new body … you will never be able to rest till you find your fere, wherever she may have been born.” As tutor at Hilton Hall he meets Lady Alice, an orphan ward thought dull and strange, a somnambulist who walks in her sleep to his room; he wakes her; a rapport of “love and power” grows between them; an old manuscript shows they were born in the same hour and that both their mothers died; the clanking shoe is heard at the moment of discovery; Lord Hilton bursts in, Duncan is dismissed and Alice falls ill. He becomes a soldier, is sabred, sees — or thinks he sees — Alice’s face at an asylum window abroad, and searches for years, until in the Chamber of Ghosts he doubts his own sanity: “Rather let me be mad still … if mad I am; and so dream on that I have been blessed.” Here the Cornhill serial ended. The 1864 continuation brings him, a half-pay captain under a doctor’s care, back to Hilton, where Alice is kept as an imbecile; he wakes her mind night after night and carries her off; and the last chapter, “Freedom”, closes the psychic door: “We have never again heard the clanking shoe … It was as if the gates of the unseen world were closing against us, because we had shut ourselves up in the world of the present. But we let it go gladly. We felt that love was the gate to an unseen world infinitely beyond that region of the psychological in which we had hitherto moved; for this love was teaching us to love all men, and live for all men.” The doctor “has occasionally hinted at the sabre-cut as the key to all the mysteries”.
Esoteric symbolism and takeaway. The Portent is MacDonald’s one sustained treatment of the second sight, somnambulism, reincarnation (Margaret’s speculation that Duncan is the murdered brother “come again in a new body”) and the mesmeric “rapport” of two souls; and it ends by subordinating all of it — “that region of the psychological” — to the love that opens a higher gate. The library scene, in which the tutor finds “a whole nest of the German classics”, is, on Greville’s evidence, MacDonald’s own summer of 1842; the “inner vision” is treated with entire seriousness and then let go, which is the pattern of his whole dealing with the occult.50
Dealings With the Fairies (1867)#
At a glance. London: Alexander Strahan, 1867; a small volume illustrated by Arthur Hughes, with a one-line dedication — “You have read them all before except the last” — and containing five tales: “The Light Princess”, “The Giant’s Heart” and “The Shadows” (all first printed in Adela Cathcart, 1864), “Cross Purposes” and “The Golden Key” (new). The stories were reprinted, with “Little Daylight”, “The Carasoyn” and others, in the ninth and tenth volumes of Works of Fancy and Imagination (1871), and in the American Light Princess and Other Fairy Tales (New York: Putnam, 1893) for which MacDonald wrote “The Fantastic Imagination”.51
“The Light Princess”. A king forgets to invite his sister, the Princess Makemnoit, to his daughter’s christening; the witch turns round three times and curses the child — “Light of spirit, by my charms, / Light of body, every part, / Never weary human arms — / Only crush thy parents’ heart!” — depriving her “of all her gravity” in both senses. She floats, laughs at everything, and is the subject of consultations with the two philosophers Hum-Drum, “a Materialist”, and Kopy-Keck, “a spiritualist”, to no purpose; only in the lake does she have weight, and there a wandering prince becomes her swimming companion and falls in love. Makemnoit, with her serpent-familiar, drains the lake through a hole in its bed; a gold plate is found reading “Death alone from death can save. / Love is death, and so is brave. / Love can fill the deepest grave. / Love loves on beneath the wave” — and on its reverse, that only “the body of a living man” can stop the flow. The prince offers himself (“Here I am”), lies in the hole while the princess feeds him biscuit and wine from a boat, asks for a kiss and receives “a long, sweet, cold kiss”, and goes under: “Now … I die happy.” The princess shrieks, springs into the lake, hauls him out, rows him home and, with the nurse, revives him at sunrise; then she “burst into a passion of tears, and fell on the floor”, rain falls, “The palace was in the heart of a rainbow”, and the nurse cries, “My darling child! she’s found her gravity!” The witch’s house, undermined by the water, falls in on her. The tale is MacDonald’s lightest and its argument is his gravest: the soul without weight — without sorrow, seriousness or the capacity to be crushed — cannot love, and gains gravity only through a death offered for her.
“The Giant’s Heart” and “Cross Purposes”. In the first, Tricksey-Wee and her brother Buffy-Bob stray into Giantland, learn from the birds and spiders that the child-eating giant Thunderthump keeps his heart outside his body, fetch it from the eagle’s nest and squeeze promises out of him — never to eat a child, never to cross the border — until, given back, “it expanded to the size of a bullock” and Buffy-Bob stabs it: “with a dreadful groan the giant fell dead at the feet of little Tricksey-Wee, who could not help being sorry for him after all.” Tolkien noted that its central motive is traditional. In “Cross Purposes” the Queen of Fairyland, “finding her own subjects far too well-behaved to be amusing”, has the squire’s pretty, silly daughter Alice and the poor, bookish widow’s son Richard fetched into Fairyland by the fairy Peaseblossom and the goblin Toadstool, who then abandon them; forced to help one another through the trials of the way, they “seemed to have grown quite man and woman in Fairyland”, and are sent home with leave to return. Fairyland here is the place where two mortals become themselves by being useful to each other.
“The Shadows”. Ralph Rinkelmann, a maker of comic sketches, is elected king of the fairies while he lies between life and death — “it is only between life and death that the fairies have power over grown-up mortals” — and is visited by the Shadows, who “always jest in earnest”, one of whom draws a finger across his forehead so that his eyes are “opened in more senses than one”. They carry him over the sea to their church, a frozen lake in Iceland under the aurora: “this is our church — the Church of the Shadows … The human Shadows. The Shadows of men, and women, and their children.” “We do not belong to the sunshine at all”; they show themselves “in the twilight of the fire, or when one man or woman is alone with a single candle”, and their calling is “to make people silent and thoughtful; to awe them a little”; gaslight is banishing them from the towns. “Can that be true that loves the night?” asks the king. “The darkness is the nurse of light.” At the Christmas assembly they report their year’s work: a murderer made to confess, a lover shown the shadow on a girl’s forehead, a clergyman made to see himself “very like an ape”, a dying miser reconciled to his granddaughter, and a palace where “a wise prince” lay dead and “the mother of her people” wept. They long “to be Shadows no more, but winged angels, which are the white shadows cast in heaven from the Light of Light”; and the king, seeing on his wall “the Shadow of a Little Child” — his own — “rejoiced that he was a man, and not a Shadow … A man sees a man where a Shadow sees only a Shadow.” The tale is MacDonald’s theory of the moral imagination in fable: the shadows that conscience casts in firelight, which the electric age is abolishing.52
“The Golden Key”. A boy on the borders of Fairyland, where “things that look real in this country look very thin indeed”, is told by his great-aunt that at the rainbow’s end lies a golden key. “And what is the key for? … What will it open?” “That nobody knows … He has to find that out.” “Better never find it than sell it.” One evening he sees the rainbow’s foot in the forest — a rainbow independent of the sun, with “a colour he had never seen before” beyond the violet, and in each colour “beautiful forms slowly ascending as if by the steps of a winding stair … men and women and children” — and in the morning finds the key, “the pipe of it … of plain gold … the handle … set with sapphires”. “How could anybody be so silly as make a key for which there was no lock?” A neglected merchant’s daughter, called Tangle by the servants, flees the tidy-loving fairies into the forest, is saved from a grasping tree by an air-fish, “covered, instead of scales, with feathers of all colours”, with the head of an owl, and is led to a round cottage without windows whose doors open only from inside, where a lady “thousands of years old” — “I have no time to grow old … It is very idle to grow old” — greets her: “Ah, you are come at last! I have been looking for you a long time.” “The servants always call me Tangle.” “Ten.” Three years pass in an evening; she is bathed in a tank of air-fishes, dressed in green, and fed on the fish that led her, for “In Fairyland … the ambition of the animals is to be eaten by the people; for that is their highest end in that condition. But they are not therefore destroyed” — and from the pot rises “a lovely little creature in human shape, with large white wings”. The lady’s name is Grandmother; she “never tell[s] stories, even in fun … It would come true if I said it.” The wisest fish is sent for “a young man … who does not know where to go”, and Mossy — so called from the mossy stone he read on — arrives with the key; the lady kisses him on the forehead and “stood before him like a servant”: “Because you have got the golden key.” “You must look for the key-hole. That is your work. I cannot help you.” “I am never allowed to keep my children long.” “No girl need be afraid to go with a youth that has the golden key.” Kissing Tangle on the mouth and Mossy on the forehead, she sends them east, warning that if they lose each other “in the — the — I never can remember the name of that country — do not be afraid, but go on and on.”
Through a gallery in the rock they come to a circular plain ringed with mountains — the valley of shadows, where “the shadows of leaves innumerable” of trees that are nowhere to be seen cover the ground, and shadow-forms of lovers, fathers and sons, wild horses and “the grand stride of a Titanic shape” pass over it, cast from above by a bright mist: “they were each longing after the country whence the shadows fell.” “What if your golden key should be the key to it?” Crossing it, “before night Mossy’s hair was streaked with gray, and Tangle had got wrinkles on her forehead”; in the dark they lose each other. Tangle, remembering “go straight on”, is led by the fish, now “an aëranth”, to the sea-shore and to the Old Man of the Sea, a white-haired man with a staff “covered with green buds”, in a house like “a petrified ship turned upside down” whose window looks on the deep; he bathes her (“receiving all the good of sleep without undergoing its forgetfulness”) and appears afterwards “a grand man, with a majestic and beautiful face”: “Some people call me the Old Man of the Sea. Others have another name for me, and are terribly frightened when they meet me taking a walk by the shore.” He sends her down to the Old Man of the Earth, who from behind is bent double with a white beard and from the front “a youth of marvellous beauty … entranced with the delight of what he beheld in a mirror” — “I only dream about it myself. I see its shadows sometimes in my mirror” — and who tells her that the Old Man of the Fire “is much older than I am. He is the oldest man of all”, and that the way is a hole “plumb-down”: “You must throw yourself in. There is no other way.” She looks in his face “for a whole minute, as she thought: it was a whole year — then threw herself headlong.” Through a burning underground river (“I can bear it no longer.” Yet she went on) she reaches a mossy cave where “she was in the secret of the earth and all its ways … everything meant the same thing, though she could not have put it into words again”, and finds “a little naked child sitting on the moss … playing with balls of various colours and sizes, which he disposed in strange figures” (MacDonald’s footnote: “I think I must be indebted to Novalis for these geometrical figures”). Seven years pass like seven hours. “Where is the Old Man of the Fire?” “Here I am,” answered the child — with “an awfulness of absolute repose on the face” and eyes whose love “was deep as the centre”: “Yes, I am. I am very, very old … I can help everybody.” He lays “his little cool hand on her heart”: “Now … you can go. The fire will not burn you.” A serpent hatched from an egg draws a line in the sand of a desert of molten metals: “Follow that serpent. He will lead you the right way.”
Mossy meanwhile has reached the sea, an old man with the key still clenched in his hand, and sees the Old Man of the Sea at once as “a strong kingly man of middle age” — “Your sight, young man, is better than that of most who take this way.” After the bath: “‘You have tasted of death now,’ said the Old Man. ‘Is it good?’ ‘It is good,’ said Mossy. ‘It is better than life.’ ‘No,’ said the Old Man, ‘it is only more life. — Your feet will make no holes in the water now.’” He walks on the sea eastward, guided by a shining fish beneath it, to a precipice with a sapphire-ringed keyhole, climbs a stair that lets itself down to him, and in a hall of shining stones with “seven columns, ranged from red to violet” finds Tangle on a pedestal, who has waited seven years: “you are like the Old Man of the Sea. No. You are like the Old Man of the Earth. No, no. You are like the oldest man of all. You are like them all. And yet you are my own old Mossy! … For they were younger and better, and stronger and wiser, than they had ever been before.” An eighth pillar, “of the same new colour that he had seen in the rainbow”, bears the keyhole; “It turned in the lock to the sound of Aeolian music … The key vanished from his fingers. Tangle went up. Mossy followed … They were in the rainbow … Stairs beside stairs wound up together, and beautiful beings of all ages climbed along with them. They knew that they were going up to the country whence the shadows fall. And by this time I think they must have got there.”
Characters and esoteric symbolism. Mossy and Tangle: the soul’s two halves, the finder of the key and the one led by the fish, who must lose each other in the valley of shadows and be reunited old and young at the door. The Grandmother: the ageless wisdom-figure of the round house, who cannot help but only send. The air-fish/aëranth: the guide who gives its life to be eaten and is not thereby destroyed — MacDonald’s answer to the question of the animals. The three Old Men: of the Sea (Death, “terribly frightened when they meet me”), of the Earth (the dreamer at the mirror, old behind and young before), and of the Fire (the oldest of all, a child at play with the geometrical figures of creation): three ages of the one Ancient of Days, read backwards, so that the oldest is the youngest, as the sermons say God is childlike. The serpent drawn in a line, the guide through the desert of molten gold, silver and copper. The tale is MacDonald’s Platonism in its purest form: the valley of shadows is the cave of the Republic, the “country whence the shadows fall” the world of forms, and the rainbow of an unseen sun with its eighth colour the ladder up to it. The keyhole found only after the key, the bath that is death and “only more life”, the descent through fire to the child who is the centre, the seven pillars and the eighth — these have been read as alchemical, Boehmean (the seven properties of nature and the eighth that transcends them), Swedenborgian and simply Christian, and MacDonald’s essay of 1893 forbids any of the readings to exclude the others: the tale “cannot help having some meaning”, and it is there “to wake” it. Tolkien named it as the tale in which MacDonald achieved “stories of power and beauty when he succeeded”, and Auden wrote an afterword for the edition Maurice Sendak illustrated in 1967.53
Takeaway. “The Golden Key” is the whole of MacDonald’s metaphysics in twenty pages: the key given before its lock, the guide that must be eaten, the country whence the shadows fall, the bath of death that is more life, the descent through fire to the childlike centre, and the ascent by stairs of light. It is the tale that Lewis meant when he said that in MacDonald myth exists “not in words”, and the one that the Inklings could not agree about.
At the Back of the North Wind (1871)#
At a glance. London: Strahan, 1871 (issued at the end of 1870); serialised in Good Words for the Young, the magazine MacDonald edited from 1869, over 1868–70; illustrated by Arthur Hughes; thirty-eight chapters. The opening sentence sets the book against its classical source: “I have been asked to tell you about the back of the north wind. An old Greek writer mentions a people who lived there, and were so comfortable that they could not bear it any longer, and drowned themselves. My story is not the same as his. I do not think Herodotus had got the right account of the place.” It contains the inset tale “Little Daylight” and the poem “Baby” (“Where did you come from, baby dear?”).54
Plot. Diamond, the small son of Joseph the coachman and his wife Martha, sleeps in a hay-loft over Mr Coleman’s coach-house, next to the horse he is named after, and through a knot-hole in the boards is visited by North Wind, a woman with streaming black hair who is now tiny, now taller than the house. She takes him flying over London by night; in the summer-house she tells him she must sink a ship — “Sink a ship! What! with men in it?” “Yes, and women too” — and he learns the law of her: “I could not be cruel if I would. I can do nothing cruel, although I often do what looks like cruel to those who do not know what I really am doing. The people they say I drown, I only carry away to — to — to — well, the back of the North Wind.” He answers her as MacDonald’s theodicy answers God: “I love you, and you must love me, else how did I come to love you? How could you know how to put on such a beautiful face if you did not love me and the rest? No. You may sink as many ships as you like, and I won’t say another word.” She leaves him in the cathedral while she sinks the ship with one hand (the other holding him), carries him north to her doorstep on an iceberg, where she sits “like one of the great figures at the door of an Egyptian temple, motionless … Her face was white as the snow, her eyes were blue as the air in the ice-cave”, and tells him that to reach the country at her back “you must go through me … You must walk on as if I were an open door, and go right through me … It will hurt you, though.” “The cold stung him like fire … It was when he reached North Wind’s heart that he fainted and fell. But as he fell, he rolled over the threshold, and it was thus that Diamond got to the back of the north wind” (I–IX).
The country is described by three witnesses. The narrator names two: “a great Italian of noble family, who died more than five hundred years ago … Durante — that was the name of the Italian, and it means Lasting”, whose Earthly Paradise on the mountain (fire, sweet-smelling ground, an even wind, the river Lethe, “every one of them has a crown like a king and a mitre like a priest”) is the Purgatorio; and “a Scotch shepherd who died not forty years ago”, James Hogg, whose Kilmeny “had been where the cock never crew, / Where the rain never fell, and the wind never blew … A land of love and a land of light, / Withouten sun, or moon, or night”. Diamond’s own report is of “a certain still rayless light”; a river that “flowed not only through, but over grass” and “if it did not sing tunes in people’s ears, it sung tunes in their heads”; no wind; and a people who do not talk — “They only look at each other, and understand everything” — and who “looked as if they were waiting to be gladder some day”: “Nothing went wrong at the back of the north wind. Neither was anything quite right, he thought. Only everything was going to be right some day” (X). He comes home ill and recovers at Sandwich; Mr Coleman’s ship, “his last venture”, has been sunk so that North Wind might “make an honest man of him”, and the family are ruined (XI–XII). Joseph becomes a London cabman; Diamond, still a small boy, learns to drive old Diamond, rescues a drunken cabman’s family, befriends Nanny the crossing-sweeper and her grandmother Old Sal, teaches himself to read, meets Mr Raymond, “one of the kindest men in London” and “a poet himself”, who tells “Little Daylight” in the children’s hospital where Nanny lies, and whose horse Ruby, lent to Joseph, explains in Diamond’s dream that he is lame on purpose “Because I’m an angel” — an angel-horse (XIII–XXXII). Nanny dreams of the lady in the moon and the bees; Diamond dreams of the boy-angels digging for stars; a baby sister is born and he makes her the song “Where did you come from, baby dear? / Out of the everywhere into here … Where did you get those arms and hands? / Love made itself into bonds and bands” (XXV, XXX, XXXIII). Mr Raymond marries the lady of the ruby ring and takes the family to The Mound, a hunting-tower “built for Queen Elizabeth”, where Diamond is page and sleeps at the top of the tower, and where the narrator, a tutor on the next estate, finds him under a beech reading and hears the cabbies call him “God’s baby” — “He’s not right in the head” (XXXIV–XXXV). North Wind comes once more, on a hillock among the rabbit-holes: “if I were only a dream, you would not have been able to love me so … I have to shape myself various ways to various people. But the heart of me is true. People call me by dreadful names, and think they know all about me. But they don’t. Sometimes they call me Bad Fortune, sometimes Evil Chance, sometimes Ruin; and they have another name for me which they think the most dreadful of all.” “I won’t tell you that name. Do you remember having to go through me to get into the country at my back? … You were very near knowing what they call me then.” What he saw there was “only a picture of it. The real country at my real back is ever so much more beautiful than that. You shall see it one day — perhaps before very long” (XXXVI). The narrator warns that “there is a still better love than that of the wonderful being you call North Wind. Even if she be a dream, the dream of such a beautiful creature could not come to you by chance.” Diamond sees her a last time, sitting “as I saw her sit on her own doorstep, as white as snow, and her eyes as blue as the heart of an iceberg. She looked at me, but never moved or spoke … I think I have been rather cold ever since though.” Four days later he is found on the floor outside his door, “fast asleep, as we thought”: “A lovely figure, as white and almost as clear as alabaster, was lying on the bed. I saw at once how it was. They thought he was dead. I knew that he had gone to the back of the north wind” (XXXVII–XXXVIII).
“Little Daylight”. A princess cursed at her christening by an uninvited swamp-fairy to “sleep all day” and, when a good fairy amends it — “she shall, at least, wake all night” — to “wax and wane with its mistress, the moon”, until “a prince comes who shall kiss her without knowing it”. She grows to seventeen, glorious at the full and withered at the wane; a prince fleeing after his father’s defeat sees her dancing to the moon; at the dark of the moon he finds a dying old woman under a birch, tends her — “‘Mother, mother!’ he said. ‘Poor mother!’ and kissed her on the withered lips” — and carries her home at dawn: “that face was bright as the never-aging Dawn … It was Daylight herself.” “‘You kissed me when I was an old woman: there! I kiss you when I am a young princess,’ murmured Daylight. — ‘Is that the sun coming?’” The narrator adds that “wicked fairies are dreadfully stupid, for, although from the beginning of the world they have really helped instead of thwarting the good fairies, not one of them is a bit wiser for it.”
Characters. Diamond: the holy child, MacDonald’s first full study of the innocent whom the world calls “a silly” and “God’s baby”, and the fictional test of “The Child in the Midst”. North Wind: the book’s great invention — the beautiful and terrible feminine who is Providence, Ruin and, by the name she withholds, Death, and whose doorstep is the threshold of the Earthly Paradise; Kegler has read Diamond, with Sir David in The Marquis of Lossie, as a Swedenborgian image of the Maximus Homo, the child in whom the greater man is figured. Nanny and Jim: the street children whom Diamond’s love reaches. Mr Raymond: the poet-benefactor. Old Diamond and Ruby: the horses, one a horse and one an angel.
Major themes and esoteric symbolism. Death as the door one must go through — the iceberg, the heart of North Wind, the threshold; the dark name that love need not know; the two worlds, London and the country at the back, joined by dream; the Earthly Paradise of Dante and the fairy-land of Hogg identified; the moon-princess of “Little Daylight” as the soul that waxes and wanes and is redeemed by a kiss given to age. The book’s answer to the question of evil is Diamond’s: “How could you know how to put on such a beautiful face if you did not love me and the rest?”; its answer to the question of death is the ending’s calm.
Relation to other works and takeaway. North Wind is the Grandmother of “The Golden Key” and Queen Irene in another dress and with the other name; the “still rayless light” and the river that flows over grass return in the city of Lilith. Susy Clemens’s worn copy moved her father to write of the book in 1899; Chesterton, Lewis and Auden placed it with the two Princess books at the centre of the achievement. It is the book in which MacDonald’s doctrine that “what men call death is but a shadow” is told, for the childlike, as a story about a boy who was “rather cold ever since”.55
The Princess and the Goblin (1872)#
At a glance. London: Strahan, 1872 (issued late 1871); serialised in Good Words for the Young, 1870–71; illustrated by Arthur Hughes; thirty-two chapters. Later editions open with a dialogue: “‘But, Mr. Author, why do you always write about princesses?’ ‘Because every little girl is a princess.’ ‘You will make them vain if you tell them that.’ ‘Not if they understand what I mean … every little girl is a princess, and there would be no need to say anything about it, except that she is always in danger of forgetting her rank, and behaving as if she had grown out of the mud.’”56
Plot. The princess Irene, about eight, is brought up in “a large house, half castle, half farmhouse” on a mountain honeycombed with the mines of her father’s kingdom and with the caverns of the goblins — “called by some gnomes, by some kobolds, by some goblins” — a race that withdrew underground generations ago in resentment of the king’s laws, has grown hideous and clever, hates the miners, has soft feet with no toes, and cannot bear rhymes. Lost in the upper regions of the house on a rainy day, she climbs a stair and finds an old lady spinning: “I’m your great-great-grandmother … I’m your father’s mother’s father’s mother … I came here to take care of you.” She lives on pigeons’ eggs, keeps white pigeons, and has given Irene her own name — “A name is one of those things one can give away and keep all the same.” The nurse Lootie does not believe a word of it, and Irene cannot find the stair again (I–V). Curdie Peterson, the miner’s son, twelve years old, rescues Irene and Lootie from the goblins at night by singing at them (“Ring! dod! bang! / Go the hammers’ clang! … Thus we rive the rocks, / Force the goblin locks”), and is promised a kiss which Lootie forbids: “A princess mustn’t give kisses. It’s not at all proper” (VI). Working late in the mine, Curdie overhears the goblin court — the king, who wears no shoes; the queen, his second wife, whose stone shoes hide the toes she has; the prince Harelip — and learns their double plan: to flood the mines and to carry off the princess as Harelip’s bride (VII–IX). Irene finds the grandmother’s bedroom, lit by a great silver globe, “my moon”: “That never goes out, night or day … if that light were to go out you would fancy yourself lying in a bare garret, on a heap of old straw, and would not see one of the pleasant things round about you all the time.” The lady bathes her, gives her a ring, and shows her a ball of thread spun from spider-web brought “from over the great sea”: “If ever you find yourself in any danger … you must take off your ring and put it under the pillow of your bed. Then you must lay your finger … upon the thread, and follow the thread wherever it leads you.” “Oh, how delightful! It will lead me to you, grandmother, I know!” “Yes. But, remember, it may seem to you a very roundabout way indeed, and you must not doubt the thread. Of one thing you may be sure, that while you hold it, I hold it too” (XI–XV). Curdie, captured in the goblin caverns and lamed by the queen’s stone shoe, is found by Irene following the thread into the heart of the mountain; she frees him and the thread leads them out and up to the grandmother’s room — where Curdie sees nothing: “I see a big, bare, garret-room … I see a tub, and a heap of musty straw, and a withered apple, and a ray of sunlight coming through a hole in the middle of the roof … I hear the cooing of a lot of pigeons” (XVIII–XXII). He warns the household, is shot by the men-at-arms as an intruder and nursed in the king’s house; the goblins break in through the cellars and he fights them by stamping on their feet; they carry off, as they think, the princess — but Irene, following the thread, has gone to Curdie’s mother’s cottage; the flood the goblins loosed bursts into the king’s house, the grandmother’s globe lights the escape, and Curdie saves the king’s horse. “‘I promised him a kiss when we got home, but Lootie wouldn’t let me give it him … I want you to tell her that a princess must do as she promises.’ ‘Indeed she must, my child — except it be wrong … There, give Curdie a kiss.’” Curdie declines the king’s service — “Please, Your Majesty, I cannot leave my father and mother” — and asks instead for a red petticoat for his mother. In the cellar lie the dead goblins, “among the rest the queen, with the skin-shoe gone, and the stone one fast to her ankle”; the survivors “grew milder in character, and indeed became very much like the Scotch brownies”. “The rest of the history of The Princess and Curdie must be kept for another volume” (XXIII–XXXII).
Characters and esoteric symbolism. Irene (“every little girl is a princess”) and Curdie (the boy who sees only the garret and must learn to see): faith and honest sight, joined by the thread. The great-great-grandmother: the wisdom-figure at her most fully drawn — spinner of the thread, keeper of the lamp that “never goes out”, of the fire of roses and the bath, old beyond reckoning and young; Chesterton’s testimony that the book’s stairs “do not lead to the usual landings” but to the goblins below and the grandmother above, and that this made it “the most real, the most realistic, in the exact sense of the phrase the most like life” of all the stories he had read, is the classic account of the three-storeyed house as the human condition. The goblins: the subterranean race with soft feet and hard heads, who cannot bear song — the earthy, unbaptised nature, “brownies” once they are beaten. Lootie: the unbelief that cannot see the grandmother because it does not look. The thread: providence — invisible, “roundabout”, held at both ends — and the whole doctrine of obedience in a single image: “you must not doubt the thread.” The lamp, the globe, the bath, the pigeons: the Swedenborgian reading of MacDonald’s symbolism proposed by Kegler is here at its most natural (the light seen only by the believing eye), but the imagery is also that of the Wisdom books, of Dante’s Beatrice and of the Grail.
Takeaway. The book’s argument is the sermon “The Higher Faith” told as a story: “Seeing is not believing — it is only seeing”; the grandmother is there whether or not Curdie can see her; and the thread, followed downward into the mountain, leads up.57
The Wise Woman: A Parable (1875)#
At a glance. London: Strahan, 1875; serialised as “A Double Story” in Good Things (1874) and published under that title in New York (Dodd, Mead, 1876); reissued in 1895 as The Lost Princess; or, The Wise Woman, with illustrations by Gordon Browne; fourteen chapters.58
Plot. In “a certain country where things used to go rather oddly” a princess, Rosamond, is born “Somebody” and is spoiled by praise into a violent, greedy, self-admiring child, until a wise woman comes to the palace, takes her up in her cloak and carries her over the heath to a bare cottage with one room, a fire and “the loveliest little well” (I–III). Told to keep the fire in, Rosamond lets it out and sleeps; the wise woman shows her “a tiny mirror, so clear that nobody looking into it could tell what it was made of … Rosamond saw a child with dirty fat cheeks, greedy mouth, cowardly eyes … That was what she had made herself”; she dashes it to pieces, and the wise woman gathers every fragment into the fire, from which it comes whole (IV). Behind the clock is a door into a picture-hall, “a large and stately room, lighted only from above”, where between the pillars hang pictures “from cornice to floor”; Rosamond, sure that the picture of a hillside with sheep and a barefoot shepherd girl “is the real country”, steps over the frame — “I am free, I am free!” — and is taken in by the shepherd and his wife, whose daughter Agnes is away; she is taught to work, but her temper drives them to turn her out (V). Agnes, the shepherd’s daughter, spoiled in the opposite direction into conceit, is taken by the wise woman in her turn, stripped and shut in “a great hollow sphere” without door or window, “made of a substance similar to that of the mirror … She had cared only for Somebody, and now she was going to have only Somebody”; on the third day a naked child appears “the color of pale earth, with a pinched nose, and a mere slit in her face for a mouth” — “‘Who are you?’ And the little girl said, ‘Who are you?’ ‘I am Agnes.’ … ‘I am Agnes.’” — her own self, whom she pulls by the hair and bites. Set to work, she too enters the picture-hall, prefers the picture of the great city to that of her home, steps through it and becomes a scullery-maid in the palace (VI–XI). Rosamond, having walked back over the heath among “ugly creatures”, returns to the cottage: “Rosamond, if you would be a blessed creature instead of a mere wretch, you must submit to be tried … Nobody can be a real princess — do not imagine you have yet been any thing more than a mock one — until she is a princess over herself, that is, until, when she finds herself unwilling to do the thing that is right, she makes herself do it. So long as any mood she is in makes her do the thing she will be sorry for when that mood is over, she is a slave, and no princess.” The trial is the “mood-chambers”: rooms whose mood comes upon her and must be dealt with. She fails twice; in the third, a forest without flowers, a lovely child on an oak-root whose cast-away flowers take root, and a winged pony, rouse her jealousy, and the flower withers at her touch — “What sort of a creature am I that the flowers wither when I touch them?” — and she passes. The child grows into “a woman perfectly beautiful, neither old nor young; for hers was the old age of everlasting youth”: the wise woman. “Which is the real you?” “The one you have just seen is the likest to the real me that you are able to see just yet … Every time you feel you want me, that is a sign I am wanting you … Do not think that the things you have seen in my house are mere empty shows. You do not know, you cannot yet think, how living and true they are … If I had not forgiven you, I would never have taken the trouble to punish you. If I had not loved you, do you think I would have carried you away in my cloak?” (XII–XIII). At the capital the shepherd and his wife have been arrested for harbouring the lost princess; the king orders them, and the ragged girl who claims to be his daughter, to the rack; Rosamond kisses the shepherd and then her parents, who fail to know her, blinded by “the pride and anger and injustice with which their hearts were filled”; the wise woman enters, throws open her cloak, and its radiance strikes the king and queen blind: “you have been blind in soul all your lives: now be blind in body until your better eyes are unsealed.” Only a charwoman sees her clearly; Agnes feels her “like the beat of a furnace seven times heated”. To Rosamond: “you must be their servant, as I have been yours. Bring them to me.” To the shepherd and his wife: “you coaxed when you ought to have compelled; you praised when you ought to have been silent; you fondled when you ought to have punished … She is your crime and your punishment. Take her home with you … When life is no longer endurable, come to me.” The shepherd asks to go with her now, and she leads him away by the hand. “And that is all my double story. How double it is, if you care to know, you must find out. If you think it is not finished — I never knew a story that was” (XIV).
Esoteric symbolism and takeaway. The mirror that shows the self as it has made itself, the sphere of solitude in which Agnes meets her own double, the picture-hall whose frames are doors, the mood-chambers, and the cloak whose light blinds the unseeing are MacDonald’s most explicit apparatus of spiritual trial; the wise woman’s “It always is me, all the time” and “the one you have just seen is the likest to the real me that you are able to see just yet” restate the doctrine of the many shapes and the one substance. The book is the sermon “Self-Denial” for children, and the sternest thing MacDonald wrote for them: the princess “over herself” is the only princess there is.59
The Princess and Curdie (1883)#
At a glance. London: Chatto & Windus, 1883; serialised in Good Things, 1877; illustrated by James Allen; thirty-five chapters. The statement in several reference works that the book was published by Strahan is wrong; Strahan’s firm had failed. The opening chapter’s meditation on mountains — “A mountain is a strange and awful thing … To me they are beautiful terrors” — describes them as “portions of the heart of the earth that have escaped from the dungeon down below … a huge power of buried sunlight”, and describes the king’s silver, locked in a chest, as growing “diseased”, to be “called mammon”.60
Plot. Curdie, now approaching thirteen, has declined the king’s service for his parents’ sake and has begun to decline himself: “he believed less and less in things he had never seen … He was gradually changing into a commonplace man. There is this difference between the growth of some human beings and that of others: in the one case it is a continuous dying, in the other a continuous resurrection.” He shoots one of the white pigeons with his bow and, as it looks at him, learns “what a pigeon was. A good many discoveries of a similar kind have to be made by most of us” (II). He carries it up the castle stair to the lady, whom he now sees, spinning: she heals the bird and reproaches him; she appears to his father in the mine as a young lady with an emerald; and she gives Curdie her names: “up there they call you Old Mother Wotherwop! And the Princess Irene told me you were her great-great-grandmother! … and you are worn to a pale shadow with old age; and are as young as anybody can be.” “I could give you twenty names more to call me, Curdie, and not one of them would be a false one. What does it matter how many names if the person is one? … Shapes are only dresses, Curdie, and dresses are only names. That which is inside is the same all the time” (III–VII). Then the ordeal: “Go and thrust both your hands into that fire” — the heap of burning roses. “He did not draw them back. He held the pain as if it were a thing that would kill him if he let it go”; the skin comes away and the hands are made new, and with them a gift: “Since it is always what they do, whether in their minds or their bodies, that makes men go down to be less than men, that is, beasts, the change always comes first in their hands — and first of all in the inside hands, to which the outside ones are but as the gloves … a beast does not know that he is a beast, and the nearer a man gets to being a beast the less he knows it … you will henceforth be able to know at once the hand of a man who is growing into a beast; nay, more — you will at once feel the foot of the beast he is growing.” The gift is forfeit if used for himself: “then, not knowing that it is gone, he is in a far worse condition than before, for he trusts to what he has not got.” She gives him Lina, a hideous beast with green eyes and a long body, whose paw he takes and feels “the soft, neat little hand of a child! … If he could but pull the child out of the beast!” (IX). Sent to the capital, Gwyntystorm, across the heath, he subdues with Lina’s help forty-nine “Uglies” of the wood — Ballbody, Legserpent, Clubhead and the rest, beasts who were once men and are climbing back — and enters a city rotten from top to bottom: the baker’s wife, the dogs that Lina kills, the prison, and an old woman Derba and her grandchild Barbara who shelter him (X–XV). In the palace the king lies drugged with poisoned wine, “a little princess with the heart of a queen” nursing him, while the lord chamberlain, the chancellor, the master of the horse and the doctor conspire to kill him and sell the kingdom to the King of Borsagrass; Curdie feels the chamberlain’s hand as “the claw of a bird of prey” and sees in Dr Kelman’s phial “the snake in it plainly visible”; Lina crushes the doctor’s leg “like a stick of celery” (XVI–XXIV). The Uglies enter the palace by night and execute a comic vengeance on the servants and officers; the first priest of the temple preaches against the palace — “they talked ever about improvement at Gwyntystorm, all the time they were going down hill with a rush” — and the city rises (XXV–XXIX). Peter arrives, sent by the lady; and in the chapter “The Sacrifice” the old princess, “large and strong as a Titaness”, lays the king on the table-altar in the fire of roses, “put her mighty arms under the living sacrifice, lifted the king, as if he were but a little child, to her bosom”, and his face shines “from under the burnt roses like a diamond in the ashes of a furnace”: “All was safe; all was well” (XXX–XXXI). The restored king, with an army of Curdie, Peter, Lina, the Uglies, the colonel of the guard, Derba and Barbara, routs the invaders and judges the traitors (XXXII–XXXIV). Then the end. Curdie is sent “into his dominions to search for men and women that had human hands”; the city is found to stand upon gold; Peter and Joan build “a warm house for their old age, high in the clear air” above the city; “Queen Irene — that was the right name of the old princess — was thereafter seldom long absent from the palace”; Lina, at the queen’s word, “dashed burrowing into the fire. There went up a black smoke and a dust, and Lina was never more seen in the palace.” “Irene and Curdie were married. The old king died, and they were king and queen. As long as they lived Gwyntystorm was a better city, and good people grew in it. But they had no children, and when they died the people chose a king. And the new king went mining and mining in the rock under the city, and grew more and more eager after the gold … he caused the miners to reduce the pillars which Peter and they that followed him had left standing to bear the city. And from the girth of an oak of a thousand years, they chipped them down to that of a fir tree of fifty. One day at noon, when life was at its highest, the whole city fell with a roaring crash. The cries of men and the shrieks of women went up with its dust, and then there was a great silence. Where the mighty rock once towered, crowded with homes and crowned with a palace, now rushes and raves a stone-obstructed rapid of the river. All around spreads a wilderness of wild deer, and the very name of Gwyntystorm had ceased from the lips of men” (XXXV).
Characters, esoteric symbolism and takeaway. Curdie is now the subject — the honest boy who has begun to become “a commonplace man” and is remade through the fire; the lady is revealed as Queen Irene, the Mistress of the Silver Moon, Old Mother Wotherwop, who is “one” under all names; Lina is the beast who is a child inside, and who enters the fire at the end, presumably to come out what she was; the Uglies are men who have gone down into beasts and are climbing back; the king is the soul poisoned by its own court, restored by being laid, “as if he were but a little child”, in the fire. The doctrine of the hands — that men become beasts by what they do, “first of all in the inside hands”, and that the gift of perceiving it is lost by the first self-interested use — is MacDonald’s theory of moral perception in a single image, and it is Kirstin Jeffrey Johnson’s contention that the book conducts an argument with Maurice, Arnold and Isaiah on the nature of the “kingdom”. The fire of roses that burns Curdie’s hands and then the king’s whole body is the consuming fire of the sermons in the plainest form MacDonald ever gave it. The ending, which has troubled readers since 1883, is the doctrine that no reform is final and that the city built on gold will mine its own foundations: Gwyntystorm falls “when life was at its highest”, and the story refuses the happy ending its predecessor supplied.61
The Gifts of the Child Christ, and Other Tales (1882) and “The History of Photogen and Nycteris”#
At a glance. 2 vols. London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1882; reissued in one volume as Stephen Archer and Other Tales (Sampson Low, 1883), containing “Stephen Archer”, “The Gifts of the Child Christ”, “The History of Photogen and Nycteris: A Day and Night Mährchen”, “The Butcher’s Bills”, “Port in a Storm” and the play “If I Had a Father”. “The Gifts of the Child Christ” is the story of a neglected London child, Phosy, who has heard that “whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth” and wishes he would chasten her, and who, finding her stepmother’s stillborn baby on Christmas morning, takes it for “the dead Jesus” and by her mistake transforms her father, her stepmother and the house: “She had lost a son for a season, but she had gained a daughter for ever. / Such were the gifts the Christ-child brought to one household that Christmas.”62
“Photogen and Nycteris”. “There was once a witch who desired to know everything. But the wiser a witch is, the harder she knocks her head against the wall when she comes to it. Her name was Watho, and she had a wolf in her mind. She cared for nothing in itself — only for knowing it. She was not naturally cruel, but the wolf had made her cruel.” Tall, white-skinned, red-haired, black-eyed with “a red fire in them”, Watho lodges two women apart in her castle: the golden-haired Lady Aurora in sunny upper rooms, and the blind, widowed Vesper, with her “look of darkened silver”, in chambers cut in the rock “after the tomb of an Egyptian king”. Aurora’s boy Photogen is taken from her (she is told he died) and reared never to know darkness, that light “might sit in every fibre”; Vesper dies in bearing a girl, Nycteris, “the little bat”, reared in the tomb by a single lamp. The experiment is Watho’s: a child of the day and a child of the night. When the lamp goes out Nycteris finds her way up into the night and discovers the moon, “the great lamp”, the garden, the wind and the river; there she meets Photogen, who has stayed out past sunset and is terrified of the dark — “The Coward Hero” — and comforts him; at sunrise he runs off and she is blinded by the day. Watho, ill and hating her failed experiment (“In the hearts of witches, love and hate lie close together”), torments Photogen with his own arrows; the two flee together across the plain, he carrying her by day and she leading him by night; Watho anoints herself, ties her red hair round her waist, dances herself into a werewolf and pursues them; Photogen shoots “a great red wolf” — “There lay — no wolf, but Watho, with her hair tied round her waist! The foolish witch had made herself invulnerable, as she supposed, but had forgotten that, to torment Photogen therewith, she had handled one of his arrows.” “They were married that very day”; Aurora and her husband are found at court; “Through Watho, the mothers, who had never seen each other, had changed eyes in their children”; and the ending is MacDonald’s doctrine of the two worlds as complementary: Nycteris “had come to love the day best, because it was the clothing and crown of Photogen … and Photogen had come to love the night best, because it was the mother and home of Nycteris. ‘But who knows,’ Nycteris would say to Photogen, ‘that, when we go out, we shall not go into a day as much greater than your day as your day is greater than my night?’”
Takeaway. The tale is MacDonald’s judgement on the Faustian will to know — the wolf in the mind, the experiment on living children, the self-made invulnerability undone by its own instrument — and his fullest statement of Novalis’s night: the darkness that is “the mother and home” of the soul, and the day beyond both. Watho is the female Funkelstein, the occultist as vivisector.63
The Flight of the Shadow (1891)#
At a glance. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1891; thirty-six chapters, the last entitled “The End of the First Volume” (no second was written). The narrator, old, opens: “I am old, else, I think, I should not have the courage to tell the story I am going to tell … Half the misery in the world comes from trying to look, instead of trying to be, what one is not”; and “No one who loves and chooses a secret can be of the pure in heart that shall see God.”64
Plot. Belorba Whichcote, “Orba”, orphaned, is brought up on a moorland farm by her uncle Edward Whichcote, a doctor who has withdrawn from the world, and the housekeeper Martha Moon. Lost on the moor as a child, she is taken into Rising, the house of Lady Cairnedge, whose white-and-gold drawing-room is “nearly covered with great mirrors from floor to ceiling”; her uncle comes for her, and in the mirror she sees him “grow white as death, and turn away, reeling”. His secret is his shadow. Orba grows up; John Day, Lady Cairnedge’s stepson, meets her on the moor and they love; Lady Cairnedge, a mocking, demonic woman on a black horse, drugs and confines John as mad to keep his property; he escapes to the Whichcotes; there is a fight hand to hand; she rides her black horse into the bog and smothers it; John and Orba marry. In Paris the uncle at last meets his shadow: what he had taken for a mirror in a doorway was an empty frame, and the figure in it his identical twin, Edmund — “the figures fell into each other’s arms, and I heard two voices weeping and sobbing, as the substance and the shadow embraced … Neither had killed the other! Neither had lost the other! The world had been a graveyard; it was a paradise!” The twins, both doctors of sorts (Edward a physician, Edmund a lawyer), had loved the same worthless woman — Lady Cairnedge in her youth — and wrestled at a Swiss torrent, each believing afterwards that he had killed the other; Edward had lived twenty years as a murderer. “The word twin means one of two that once were one.” Lady Cairnedge flees and is “found dead in her bed in a hotel in the Tyrol”; the twins live on indistinguishable, signing “Ed. Whichcote”, and their tombstone reads: “HERE LIE THE DISUSED GARMENTS OF EDWARD AND EDMUND WHICHCOTE, BORN FEB. 29, 1804; DIED JUNE 30, AND JULY 28, 1864. THEY ARE NOT HERE; THEY ARE RISEN.”
Takeaway. The late novella reworks the Shadow of Phantastes as a Doppelgänger who turns out to be a brother; the mirror that is a door, the “Thanatos” who is a grey horse, the demonic woman and the “disused garments” are the furniture of Lilith, on which MacDonald was working in the same year. “What we call misfortune is always the only good fortune,” says the uncle, which is the last sentence of Phantastes thirty-three years on.65
Lilith: A Romance (1895)#
At a glance. London: Chatto & Windus, 1895; forty-seven chapters; epigraph from Thoreau’s “Walking” on the invisible family that lives in the pines of Spaulding’s Farm, “to whom the sun was servant”; three footnotes, to William Law (“take with both hands”) and to Dante’s Paradiso (x.142) and Purgatorio (ii.30). MacDonald wrote the first version in 1890, “possessed by a feeling — he would hardly let me call it a conviction, I think — that it was a mandate direct from God, for which he himself was to find form and clothing”, in a manuscript that “runs from page to page, with few breaks into new paragraphs, with little punctuation, with scarcely a word altered”; he then rewrote it with the typewriter’s help and profuse emendation, and five years passed between the first writing and the book. Louisa was troubled by its imagery, and the manuscript was submitted to one of the sons — evidently Greville himself — who called it “the Revelation of St. George”; “some will think the earlier a better and simpler narrative”, Greville added, and “the book never got its dues … it attracted little notice.” The second edition of 1896 carries on its title-page the motto “‘Off, Lilith!’ — The Kabala”; whether the first edition of 1895 does so has not been established. The book has been the subject of a variorum edition (1997) and of readings as Kabbalistic, Swedenborgian, Neoplatonic and Blakean.66
Plot. Mr Vane, an orphan just down from Oxford, lives alone in the ancestral house with its library, where “Ptolemy, Dante, the two Bacons, and Boyle were even more to me than Darwin or Maxwell”, where a portrait of an ancestor hangs in a niche, and where there is a legend of “a Mr. Raven, long time librarian to ‘that Sir Upward whose portrait hangs there among the books.’ Sir Upward was a great reader … of strange, forbidden, and evil books; and in so doing, Mr. Raven, who was probably the devil himself, encouraged him. Suddenly they both disappeared.” Vane sees a figure at the shelves and follows it to the garret, where stands “a tall mirror with a dusty face, old-fashioned and rather narrow … It had an ebony frame, on the top of which stood a black eagle, with outstretched wings, in his beak a golden chain, from whose end hung a black ball”; the mirror shows “a wild country, broken and heathy”, and stumbling over the frame he is “in the open air, on a houseless heath!” (I–II). The raven he follows becomes a man — the librarian — who tells him that he is “In the region of the seven dimensions”, that “That tree stands on the hearth of your kitchen, and grows nearly straight up its chimney”, that “you have not yet left your house, neither has your house left you. At the same time it cannot contain you, or you inhabit it!”, and that “No one can say he is himself, until first he knows that he IS, and then what HIMSELF is. In fact, nobody is himself, and himself is nobody … home, as you may or may not know, is the only place where you can go out and in” (III–IV). The raven is a sexton; his wife (Eve) keeps a cottage by an old church, and behind it a vast cold chamber of couches on which the dead sleep. “Every one, as you ought to know, has a beast-self — and a bird-self, and a stupid fish-self, ay, and a creeping serpent-self too — which it takes a deal of crushing to kill! In truth he has also a tree-self and a crystal-self, and I don’t know how many selves more — all to get into harmony.” They offer him a couch: “Give yourself up to the night, and you will rest indeed.” He refuses — “Would they have me make of a charnel-house my bed-chamber? … I will NOT” — and flees home (V–VII). His father’s manuscript tells him that his father too had met Mr Raven and learned “what Sir Upward had taught me”, and explains the mirror: sunlight thrown from one mirror to another, “Suspecting polarisation as the thing required, I shifted and shifted the mirrors, changing their relation, until … I saw the mountains blue and steady and clear. I stepped forward, and my feet were among the heather.” Vane repents and goes back (VIII–IX).
The second journey is the book. He crosses the Bad Burrow, where monsters heave under the dry ground, and the Evil Wood, where phantom armies fight by night (X–XII), and comes to the Little Ones, children who never grow, living in the trees, mothered by the eldest of them, Lona, and feeding the stupid giants, the “Bags”, of the same dry valley: “The giants were not made always. If a Little One doesn’t care, he grows greedy, and then lazy, and then big, and then stupid, and then bad. The dull creatures don’t know that they come from us” (XIII–XIV). In a cottage a woman whom the people call the Cat-woman — Mara, “the Lady of Sorrow”, though “It is not my name” — tells him the prophecy of the palace library at Bulika: “after the Lovers have gone through great troubles and learned their own name, they will fill the land, and make the giants their slaves … when they are thirsty enough, they will have water, and when they have water, they will grow … And, beneath, it is flowing still” (XV). By moonlight he watches the skeletons of the dead dance in a ruined hall and a skeleton lord and lady quarrel (“every grain of truthfulness adds a fibre to the show of their humanity. Nothing but truth can appear; and whatever is must seem”) (XVI–XVIII). By a hot stream he finds an emaciated woman, nurses her for months with his own warmth, and does not understand why he wakes weaker: she is “the white leech” who drinks his blood by night; she vanishes (XIX–XX). At Bulika, the walled city of a princess who allows no children because a child is prophesied to destroy her, he learns that the woman he revived is the princess; she calls him to her palace; her white leopardess and Mara’s spotted one fight in the street; and he is silenced and bound at the silent fountain and escapes through the burrow (XXI–XXVIII). At home, Lilith follows him into the library as a Persian cat, and Mr Raven reads her history from the manuscript: “Mr. Vane, when God created me — not out of Nothing, as say the unwise, but out of His own endless glory — He brought me an angelic splendour to be my wife: there she lies! For her first thought was POWER; she counted it slavery to be one with me, and bear children for Him who gave her being. One child, indeed, she bore; then, puffed with the fancy that she had created her, would have me fall down and worship her! Finding, however, that I would but love and honour, never obey and worship her, she poured out her blood to escape me, fled to the army of the aliens, and soon had so ensnared the heart of the great Shadow, that he became her slave, wrought her will, and made her queen of Hell … The one child of her body she fears and hates, and would kill … Of creating, she knows no more than the crystal that takes its allotted shape, or the worm that makes two worms when it is cloven asunder. Vilest of God’s creatures, she lives by the blood and lives and souls of men. She consumes and slays, but is powerless to destroy as to create.” “Then God gave me another wife — not an angel but a woman — who is to this as light is to darkness … my Eve repented, and is now beautiful as never was woman or angel, while her groaning, travailing world is the nursery of our Father’s children. I too have repented, and am blessed. — Thou, Lilith, hast not yet repented; but thou must.” “Then at last I understood that Mr. Raven was indeed Adam, the old and the new man; and that his wife, ministering in the house of the dead, was Eve, the mother of us all, the lady of the New Jerusalem.” Under her right hand is a spot: “It is not on the leopard; it is in the woman! … Nor will it leave thee until it hath eaten to thy heart.” “The evil thou meditatest … thou shalt never compass, Lilith, for Good and not Evil is the Universe. The battle between them may last for countless ages, but it must end … Repent, I beseech thee; repent, and be again an angel of God!” “I will not repent. I will drink the blood of thy child.” Adam locks her, a grey cat, in the closet (XXIX). “Annihilation itself is no death to evil. Only good where evil was, is evil dead. An evil thing must live with its evil until it chooses to be good. That alone is the slaying of evil.” Lona is Lilith’s daughter and the child of the prophecy; and to Vane, still refusing the couch: “you will be dead, so long as you refuse to die” (XXX–XXXI).
Vane rides the sexton’s old horse to the Little Ones, and they march on Bulika with elephants and little horses (XXXII–XXXV). In the princess’s hall Lona runs to her — “Mother! mother!” — and is “lifted high, and dashed on the marble floor”: “‘Mother! mother!’ she sighed, and her breathing ceased” (XXXVI). Lilith, bound, is carried on an elephant to the House of Bitterness, where Mara makes her see. “There is a light that goes deeper than the will, a light that lights up the darkness behind it: that light can change your will, can make it truly yours and not another’s — not the Shadow’s. Into the created can pour itself the creating will, and so redeem it!” “There is no slave but the creature that wills against its creator. Who is a slave but her who cries, ‘I am free,’ yet cannot cease to exist! … She alone is free who would make free.” “I will do as my Self pleases — as my Self desires.” “You will do as the Shadow, overshadowing your Self inclines you?” “I am not another’s; I am my own, and my daughter is mine … I am what I am; no one can take from me myself!” Then a worm “white-hot, vivid as incandescent silver, the live heart of essential fire” enters her by the black spot. “She is seeing herself!” said Mara. “She is far away from us, afar in the hell of her self-consciousness. The central fire of the universe is radiating into her the knowledge of good and evil, the knowledge of what she is. She sees at last the good she is not, the evil she is. She knows that she is herself the fire in which she is burning, but she does not know that the Light of Life is the heart of that fire. Her torment is that she is what she is.” “Why did he make me such? … I will not be made any longer!” “Unmake yourself, then.” “Alas, I cannot!” “He will not change you; he will only restore you to what you were.” “Open thy hand, and let that which is in it go.” “I cannot … Open it for me.” “You must open it yourself.” “I KNOW that I cannot open my hand!” Then “LIFE IN DEATH — life dead, yet existent”; “The darkness knows neither the light nor itself; only the light knows itself and the darkness also. None but God hates evil and understands it”; “She was what God could not have created. She had usurped beyond her share in self-creation, and her part had undone His!” “Her right hand also was now clenched — upon existent Nothing — her inheritance! But with God all things are possible: He can save even the rich!” “I yield … I cannot hold out. I am defeated. — Not the less, I cannot open my hand.” “A slave thou art that shall one day be a child! … Thou shalt die out of death into life.” Mara kisses her on the forehead, and “the rain that heals the mown, the many-wounded grass” falls (XXXVII–XXXIX). In the house of death Eve tells her that her daughter is “but sent into the loveliest sleep, for she was already a long time dead when you slew her. And now Death shall be the atonemaker; you shall sleep together”; that “no one can kill you but the Shadow; and whom he kills never knows she is dead, but lives to do his will, and thinks she is doing her own”; that “Even now is his head under my heel!” But the hand will not open: “the fingers have grown together and into the palm.” “There was a sword I once saw in your husband’s hands … it would divide whatever was not one and indivisible!” “I have the sword … The angel gave it me when he left the gate.” “Bring it, Adam … and cut me off this hand that I may sleep.” The blade flashes “like a pale blue northern streamer”; “there was one little gush of blood, and he laid the severed hand in Mara’s lap”; “A wound from that sword … needs no dressing. It is healing and not hurt”; and “Where the dead deformity clung … the true, lovely hand is already growing.” The Little Ones climb into her bed: “She will not bite any more!” (XL).
“I give me up. I am sick of myself, and would fain sleep the sleep!” Something remains to be done: Adam gives Vane the hand and a spade and sends him into the desert beyond the rock to listen for the hidden water and bury it; on the way “a Shadow — I think it was The Shadow, barred my way … I seemed to pass through him, but I think now that he passed through me: for a moment I was as one of the damned”; he buries the hand, “A little water was already oozing from under its fingers”, and the rivers of the land return “with a noise of many waters” (XLI–XLII). He lies down at last on his couch and sleeps: “I was intensely blessed … I was Adam, waiting for God to breathe into my nostrils the breath of life. — I was not Adam, but a child in the bosom of a mother white with a radiant whiteness”; he is “farther in, higher up than the seven dimensions, the ten senses: I think I was where I am — in the heart of God”; all his wrongs come to him and he makes “atonement with each person I had injured” (XLIII). “The fourth night I seemed to fall asleep, and that night woke indeed.” Lona wakes beside him, “ripe with the loveliness of the life essential”; Eve warns, “you are hardly yet awake!”; and they journey with Adam, Eve and Mara to the city whose river descends its main street, where “nothing … was dead; nothing was mere; nothing only a thing”, whose stones are alive, and whose portress is “a woman-angel of dark visage”; the Little Ones are “soldiers to take heaven itself by storm”; the steps mount towards “the throne of the Ancient of Days” and “the river of the water of life” — when “A hand, warm and strong, laid hold of mine, and drew me to a little door with a golden lock … I turned quickly, and saw the board of a large book in the act of closing behind me. I stood alone in my library” (XLIV–XLVI). “The ‘Endless Ending’”: “As yet I have not found Lona, but Mara is much with me … Can it be that that last waking also was in the dream? … Man dreams and desires; God broods and wills and quickens. When a man dreams his own dream, he is the sport of his dream; when Another gives it him, that Other is able to fulfil it … I have never again sought the mirror. The hand sent me back: I will not go out again by that door! ‘All the days of my appointed time will I wait till my change come’ … when I wake at last into that life which, as a mother her child, carries this life in its bosom, I shall know that I wake, and shall doubt no more. I wait; asleep or awake, I wait. Novalis says, ‘Our life is no dream, but it should and will perhaps become one’” (XLVII).
Characters. Vane (the name is a weathercock and a vanity): the reader of “the two Bacons” who wants to know before he will obey, and who must be sent back from the gate to wait. Mr Raven/Adam, “the old and the new man”, sexton of the dead, keeper of the angel’s sword. Eve, “the mother of us all, the lady of the New Jerusalem”, who cools the sleepers. Mara, “the Lady of Sorrow”, the Cat-woman with the white leopardess, whose house of bitterness is the purgatory where the self sees itself. Lilith, “the Angel-vampire” in Greville’s phrase — Adam’s first wife of the Talmud and the midrash, the spotted leopardess, the princess of Bulika, the white leech, the Persian cat: power as the refusal to be one with another or to bear, self-possession as the clenched hand, and the one being in the book who “will not be made any longer”. The great Shadow: Satan, who has “no thick to him”, whose head is under Eve’s heel, and who passes through Vane. Lona, Lilith’s daughter and the mother of the Little Ones, killed and asleep. The Little Ones and the giants: the two directions of growth, the childlike and the “bad” big. Sir Upward, the ancestor who read forbidden books and disappeared with the librarian: the family history of the occult which the book replaces.
Major themes. “You will be dead, so long as you refuse to die.” The self that will not be made: Lilith’s “I am my own” against Mara’s “There is no slave but the creature that wills against its creator.” The purgatorial fire of self-knowledge: “She knows that she is herself the fire in which she is burning, but she does not know that the Light of Life is the heart of that fire.” The hand that cannot open and must be cut off: Matthew 5:30 made the hinge of the plot. Sleep as the atonement: “Death shall be the atonemaker.” The two worlds “so strangely one”: the tree on the hearth, the seven dimensions, the house that cannot contain its inhabitant. Waiting: the ending’s refusal to claim the waking it has described.
Esoteric symbolism. Lilith is MacDonald’s one romance built on an explicitly esoteric legend, and he took it whole: Lilith as Adam’s first wife who refused subjection and fled, as the strangler of children, as the succubus who lives by blood, and as the paramour of Samael, “the great Shadow”, are the Lilith of the Talmud, of the Alphabet of Ben Sira and of the Zohar, transmitted through Goethe’s Walpurgis Night and Rossetti’s “Eden Bower” and Lady Lilith; the title-page motto “Off, Lilith!” of the later editions points to “the Kabala”. The mirror in the garret worked by “polarisation” and mirrors set in relation is a Victorian scientific occultism that Vane’s father learned from Sir Upward’s forbidden books; the “region of the seven dimensions” and “the ten senses” are the book’s own hyperspace, admired by James Blish and the Encyclopedia of Fantasy as a mathematician’s cosmology; the multiple selves — beast, bird, fish, serpent, tree, crystal — “all to get into harmony” are the Boehmean and Paracelsian doctrine of the compound man; the worm of “essential fire”, “the central fire of the universe”, entering by the black spot is the consuming fire of the sermons in alchemical dress; the house of death is a Blakean grave (Greville traced it to Blair’s Grave illustrations); Mara’s house is a Dantean purgatory; the New Jerusalem, the living stones, the river of the water of life and the Ancient of Days are the Apocalypse. And the book is, in Greville’s view, a corrective to “easy” universalism: Lilith is saved, but only by ages of the fire, by the sword, and by a hand cut off. The angel of the gate who gives Adam his sword, and the Shadow whose head is under Eve’s heel, keep the whole within Genesis 3.
Relation to other works. Lilith reverses Phantastes: an older man, not a youth; a library, not a fairy palace; a refusal of death sustained for forty chapters instead of accepted in one; a demonic feminine instead of the marble Ideal; and the same Novalis sentence at the end. It gathers the Lilith of “The Cruel Painter”, the Shadows of the early tale, the mirror-double of The Flight of the Shadow, the house of the dead of Adela Cathcart’s closing dream, the fire of roses of the Princess books and the “country whence the shadows fall” of “The Golden Key”.
Takeaway. Lilith is MacDonald’s Paradiso that stops at the door, and his definitive statement that the only hell is the self that will not be made and the only heaven the sleep from which one wakes “in the heart of God”. Tolkien thought he “partly failed” in it; Auden thought it and Phantastes the work of “pre-eminently a mythopoeic writer”; Lewis took from it the White Witch “of Lilith’s line” and much of the conception of The Great Divorce, whose ghosts cannot let go of themselves; and it remains, in Neil Barron’s phrase, “easily the strangest product of Victorian fantasy”.67
The Realistic Novels#
Between 1863 and 1898 MacDonald published some thirty novels of contemporary or historical life — eleven of them set in the Aberdeenshire and Moray of his boyhood and written largely in the Doric, the rest in English villages, London or the West Highlands — which made his living and his Victorian reputation. C. S. Lewis’s verdict has governed their reception: “This does not mean that they are good novels … They are best when they depart most from the canons of novel writing, and that in two directions. Sometimes they depart in order to come nearer to fantasy, as in the whole character of the hero in Sir Gibbie or the opening chapters of Wilfred Cumbermede. Sometimes they diverge into direct and prolonged preachments which would be intolerable if a man were reading for the story, but which are in fact welcome because the author, though a poor novelist, is a supreme preacher. Some of his best things are thus hidden in his dullest books.” For the present entry their interest is threefold: they carry the theology of the sermons in dialogue and in Scots; they are full of the second sight, ghosts, wraiths, somnambulism, mesmerism, haunted chambers, wizards’ rooms, philtres, dream-theophanies and holy fools; and they establish a set of recurring figures — the peasant or cobbler mystic, the holy innocent who sees “the bonny man”, the drug-eating or mesmerising villain, the renouncing hero, the strong sister — through whom MacDonald’s doctrine of obedience is enacted. They are summarised here compactly, in order of publication; the Bethany House abridgements of the 1980s by Michael Phillips, which retitled every novel and translated the Scots, are noted where they exist, since they have carried the books to a large readership that often does not know which text it is reading.68
David Elginbrod (1863)#
At a glance. 3 vols. London: Hurst & Blackett, 1863; dedicated “To the memory of Lady Noel Byron … with a love stronger than death”; Chaucer’s “And gladly wolde he lerne and gladly teche” on the title-page; three books, Turriepuffit, Arnstead, London; chapter epigraphs from Boehme’s Aurora “in Law’s translation” and from Novalis. Refused by every publisher until Dinah Mulock took it to Hurst & Blackett, who paid £90.
Plot. Hugh Sutherland, a poor Aberdeen graduate, becomes tutor at Turriepuffit, where the bailiff David Elginbrod — a peasant of massive natural piety who keeps a first edition of Boehme’s Aurora inscribed by an ancestor, and who has found on an old gravestone the epitaph that made the book famous: “Here lie I, Martin Elginbrodde: / Hae mercy o’ my soul, Lord God; / As I wad do, were I Lord God, / And ye were Martin Elginbrodde” — and his daughter Margaret, whom Hugh teaches, become his education. At Arnstead, an English country house, Hugh tutors the sickly Harry Arnold, falls under the spell of Harry’s cousin Euphra Cameron, and at a lecture on “biology” (electro-biology, that is mesmerism) meets “Herr von Funkelstein”, a Bohemian adventurer who asks whether he has “the second-sight” and who has Euphra already in his power. Séances follow in the library — a plate writes “David Elginbrod” under Hugh’s fingers, tables rap, Lady Emily is mesmerised and sickens; a ghostly light haunts the sealed room of an ancestress; Hugh sleeps there on a wager, sees the “ghost”, and the family’s crystal ring, inscribed with a cabalistic legend, vanishes with his own. Margaret, now a lady’s maid in the house, quietly breaks the mesmeric hold on Lady Emily by prayer and presence; David dies; Hugh, dismissed under suspicion, goes to London and meets Robert Falconer, the giant philanthropist of the slums, who explains the case: Euphra is enslaved by mesmerism and walks in her sleep, and the “ghost” was Euphra herself; the mesmerist “is able, by some mysterious sympathy, to produce in the mind of the patient such forceful impulses to do whatever he wills … Imagine being forced to think another man’s thoughts! That would be possession indeed!” Falconer refuses to counter-mesmerise her — “I dare not exercise a power which itself I do not understand.” Euphra, dying, resists the count’s summons and dies in Margaret’s arms; Hugh and Falconer find Funkelstein drawing Euphra’s portrait “in order to intensify his will and concentrate it upon her”, knock him down and recover the rings. Hugh returns to the fir-wood at Turriepuffit and proposes to Margaret, who shows him a withered primrose he once gave her: “Because love is enough, Hugh. — That was why.” The last chapter closes with Novalis’s Isis unveiled.
Takeaway. The book is MacDonald’s fullest engagement with the occult culture of the 1850s — mesmerism, table-turning, planchette, spirit-rapping, haunted chambers, an inscribed crystal ring, second sight, “I never dream dreams; the dreams dream me” — and his verdict on it, given in the chapter titles “Materialism alias Ghost-Hunting” and “Spirit versus Materialism”: the phenomena may be real, and they are a bondage; spirit is known by obedience and love. Falconer’s “we praise the consuming fire of life … what would be hell to one, will be quietness, and hope, and progress to another”, and “The kingdom of heaven is not come, even when God’s will is our law: it is come when God’s will is our will”, state the theology. The Times called it “the work of a man of genius”; The Reader thought the mesmerism plot “a failure”. Phillips’s abridgement is The Tutor’s First Love.69
Alec Forbes of Howglen (1865)#
At a glance. 3 vols. London: Hurst & Blackett, 1865; ninety-three chapters; set in “Glamerton”, which is Huntly.
Plot. Annie Anderson, orphaned, is lodged with her mean kinsman Robert Bruce, grocer and church elder, who boasts of “his royal ancestor” and pockets her legacy’s interest; at Murdoch Malison’s school, where the master flogs in Calvinist fury and cripples the orphan Truffey, she is protected by Alec Forbes, the young laird of Howglen. Malison is broken by remorse, dries up in the pulpit, and ends caring for the boy he maimed. Annie is befriended by the stonemason Thomas Crann, a rigid and tender Calvinist, and by blind Tibbie Dyster; Alec goes to Aberdeen, loves his cousin Kate, a “Sensitive Plant” captivated by the dissolute Beauchamp, sinks into drink and is rescued by the drunken librarian Cupples, whom he strikes; Kate dies. In the great flood Tibbie, trapped with Annie in her cottage, dreams she is in the boat with the sleeping Christ — “I’ll jist dight the weet aff o’ my Lord’s face” — and drowns; Alec carries Annie off in the boat Bonnie Annie. He sails as surgeon on a whaler, is wrecked in the Arctic and left alone in the snow, where “the silence seemed to be God himsel’ a’ aboot me”, returns in rags, proposes to Annie, and forces Bruce to refund; “Thomas grew gentler as he grew older. And he learned to hope more for other people. And then he hoped more for himself too.”
Takeaway. The most admired of the Scottish novels and the origin of the “kailyard” charge, though its village is harsh; Dodgson thought Annie “one of the most delightful” characters “in fiction”. The mystical centre is Tibbie’s dream (“Gin we be i’ the watter, the watter’s i’ the how o’ his han’”) and Alec’s Arctic epiphany; the theology is the softening of Crann’s creed by love. Abridged as The Maiden’s Bequest.70
Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood (1867)#
At a glance. 3 vols. London: Hurst & Blackett, 1867 (issued 1866); serialised in the Sunday Magazine, 1865–66; first-person, thirty-four chapters, with sermons interpolated (“What I Preached”; “Sermon on God and Mammon”; “A Sermon to Myself”).
Plot. Harry Walton, thirty and unmarried, becomes vicar of Marshmallows and befriends Old Rogers, a retired sailor of luminous simplicity; Thomas Weir the carpenter, an unbeliever embittered by his daughter Catherine’s disgrace at the hands of Captain Everard; and, at the Hall, the tyrannical Mrs Oldcastle, the elfin child Judy and Ethelwyn, whom Walton loves and first finds reading “a volume of Jacob Behmen”. Catherine forgives Everard, is reconciled to her father, receives communion and dies — “Lord, I do not deserve it. But I do love Thee”; Mrs Oldcastle tries to force Ethelwyn to marry Everard; Walton confronts them — “Then, Captain Everard, you lie” — takes Ethelwyn from the house and marries her. The last chapter recasts “Good-bye” as “God be with you. That is the older and better form.”
Takeaway. MacDonald’s manifesto of undogmatic pastoral Christianity in the Church of England he had just joined — deeds over “religious speech”, forgiveness as sacrament, the consuming fire in Weir’s conversion — with Boehme on the heroine’s table. The most widely read of the English novels; its sequels are The Seaboard Parish and The Vicar’s Daughter. Abridged as A Quiet Neighborhood.71
Guild Court: A London Story (1868)#
At a glance. 3 vols. London: Hurst & Blackett, 1868 (issued 1867); serialised in Good Words, 1867; fifty-six chapters.
Plot and takeaway. Thomas Worboise, weak son of a hard City lawyer, courts Lucy Burton in Guild Court, a small commonwealth of the poor — Kitely the bookseller and his precocious child Mattie, Spelt the tailor who adopts the waif Poppie, Fuller the curate whose daily services for City clerks are the book’s pulpit — and, tempted by the gambler Molken, drinks, gambles and steals from his employer. The ship Ningpo is lost with the Boxalls; Tom’s father dispossesses Lucy’s grandmother on an unrevoked will; Tom flees to sea as a common sailor, is brought back, confesses to Fuller, restores the money, and proves from a sailor’s evidence that the Boxalls’ little daughter outlived her parents, so that the property returns to Mrs Boxall. He marries Lucy and keeps daily prayers at St Amos. A Dickensian novel of repentance with no supernatural element; abridged as The Prodigal Apprentice.72
Robert Falconer (1868)#
At a glance. 3 vols. London: Hurst & Blackett, 1868; dedicated “To the memory of the man who stands highest in the oratory of my memory, Alexander John Scott, I, daring, presume to dedicate this book”; three parts, His Boyhood, His Youth, His Manhood, the last narrated by Archibald Gordon.
Plot. Rothieden (Huntly), in the 1830s. Robert, fourteen, lives with his grandmother Mrs Falconer, deaf, upright and Calvinist, whose son Andrew — Robert’s father — vanished years ago, a drunkard who deserted his Highland wife. Robert hides the beggar-boy Shargar, bastard of a lord, in the garret; finds his dead grandfather’s violin, “the bonny leddy”, and learns to play in secret; and sees his grandmother burn it as an idol (“An Auto da Fé”). “The first article in the creed that Robert Falconer learned was, ‘I believe in hell’”; his boyhood theology is his own “plan of salvation” — to rise at the marriage supper of the Lamb and propose that the saved “beir some o’ the sins o’ them ‘at hae ower mony … and cairry their sorrows doon in hell there; gin it maybe that they may repent … and come up here wi’ us at the lang last” — against which his grandmother sets “them ’at gangs there their doom is fixed”, and then betrays her own hope: “he’s no deid yet — I dinna believe ’at he is — and he’ll maybe win in yet.” Miss St John’s kiss of pity crowns him — “From that chrism he arose a king” — and he cuts the string of his kite: “And with the dragon, afar into the past, flew the childhood of Robert Falconer.” In Aberdeen the consumptive doubting poet Ericson, whom Robert nurses and who has “a touch of the second sight”, loves Mary St John and dies: “I expect Him, if there is a Him, to be better even than you, my beautiful … If I believed in a God, wouldn’t I trust him just?” Educated by a rich kinsman and made rich by his bequest, Falconer studies medicine and gives himself to the London poor, searching every slum for his father: “There is not a gin-palace, or yet lower hell in London, in which a man or woman can be out of God.” Andrew is found, an opium-sodden wreck, and reclaimed — “When a man once asks what he is to do, there is hope for him” — and brought to the dying grandmother: “I kent it a’ the time, O Lord. I kent it a’ the time. He’s come hame.” Falconer entails his fortune to Gordon “by word of mouth” — “It is better to endow one man, who will work as the Father works, than a hundred charities” — and sails with his father for India: “The great iron steamer went down in the middle of the Atlantic, and I have not yet seen my friend again.”
Takeaway. The most personal of the novels and the one in which the argument between federal Calvinism and MacDonald’s universalism is dramatised in a household; the grandmother’s “Eh, gin the Lord wad only tak me, and lat him gang!” is the case against the decrees in a sentence. Falconer is the ideal man — gigantic, musical, “the brother”, without creed or church — and his open-sea ending is death as “more life”. Mark Twain, who read it in 1870, thought its characters “self-righteous humbug”; Philip Hickok has read its deifying of the feminine in Mary St John and the grandmother. Abridged as The Musician’s Quest.73
The Seaboard Parish (1868)#
At a glance. 3 vols. London: Tinsley Brothers, 1868; serialised in the Sunday Magazine; sequel to Annals.
Plot and takeaway. Walton, now with six children, takes his daughter Connie, paralysed by a fall from her pony, to winter at Kilkhaven, a Cornish parish he serves for an absent incumbent; the book’s set pieces are the vicar’s dream of the skeleton horse of death ridden to the churchyard where “From the grave rose a little child”, Connie’s dream, the storm and shipwreck in which he labours among the drowned, the painter Percivale who will marry his daughter Wynnie, and the vicar’s translation of Novalis’s “Where I have but Him / Is my Fatherland”. The epilogue reports the marriages and that “Harry is gone home”, and closes with a new rendering of Hebrews 11:1: “Now faith is the essence of hopes, the trying of things unseen.” Sermons on suffering, the sea and death as more life; abridged under its own title.74
Ranald Bannerman’s Boyhood (1871) and Gutta-Percha Willie: The Working Genius (1873)#
At a glance. Ranald Bannerman’s Boyhood. London: Strahan, 1871; serialised in Good Words for the Young, 1869–70; illustrated by Arthur Hughes. Gutta-Percha Willie. London: Henry S. King, 1873; serialised in Good Words for the Young, 1872; illustrated by Hughes.
Plot and takeaway. The first is a Scots manse boyhood told in the first person — the motherless Ranald, his brothers, the loving minister-father, the storytelling Highland servant Kirsty, the cowherd Turkey, Wandering Willie the daft fiddler, and Elsie Duff whom Ranald loves and who dies: “It was thus I ceased to be a boy.” Its theology is the father’s: forgiveness, “light out of darkness”. The second is a didactic tale of a doctor’s son who learns every trade, discovers running water under a priory ruin and, a doctor himself, restores the priory as a hydropathic hospital where the rich pay for the poor: “God works more than anybody — for He works all night and all day.”75
Wilfrid Cumbermede: An Autobiographical Story (1872)#
At a glance. 3 vols. London: Hurst & Blackett, 1872 (issued 1871); serialised simultaneously in St Paul’s Magazine and Scribner’s Monthly, 1871–72; illustrated by F. A. Fraser; sixty-five chapters with an introduction: “The weakness of my life has been that I would ever do some great thing; the saving of my life has been my utter failure.”
Plot. Wilfrid, orphaned, is raised by a Quaker-like uncle and aunt near Moldwarp Hall, seat of the Brothertons; his grandmother’s dying gift is an old sword, which is carried off “by the ghost” on a night he sleeps at the Hall and reappears years later beside him as he wakes in the same bed as Mary Osborne, who has mistaken her chamber in a storm: “On the other pillow lay the face of a lovely girl.” Schooldays in Switzerland — the ice-cave; “the Jungfrau withdrew into its Holy of Holies” — bind him to Charley Osborne, son of a rigidly Calvinist rector, a boy of morbid conscience who cannot believe himself loved by God. The lawyer Coningham insinuates that the Cumbermedes are the elder line of Moldwarp; his coquettish daughter Clara is loved by Charley; the heir Geoffrey Brotherton accuses Wilfrid of stealing the sword, and to shield Mary from scandal Wilfrid blunders into a lie and gives it up: “disgrace was not dishonour.” Charley, worn by his “talk about suicide” out of Sir Thomas Browne, is found dead with “the long snake-like Indian dagger … in his heart” and buried “in the unconsecrated ground”; Mary marries Geoffrey. Guided by a dream, Wilfrid finds under a forged parchment in the Umberden register the genuine entry of 1747 proving Moldwarp his — and renounces it for Mary’s sake; ambushed by Geoffrey with a whip, he is strangling him when the touch of his white mare Lilith and the remembered Ecce Homo of Dürer stop him. Dying, years later, he learns Geoffrey is dead and resolves to claim the Hall only to give Mary a life-interest: “property involves service to every human soul that lives or labours upon it … She has sent for me. I go to her … The pure Will be done!”
Takeaway. The novel most praised by modern critics for artistic unity — Kegler calls it “perhaps MacDonald’s most consummately conceived novel” and reads its white imagery and its horse through Swedenborg — and MacDonald’s most inward study of renunciation and of Calvinism’s victim (“the dark soul-twin”). It is structured by dreams, records in Job’s words the felt presence of the dead Charley (“my whole body was aware … of the proximity of another I … I felt the hair of my head stand up”), and states the metaphysic of death in a sentence: “Death never comes near us; it lies behind the back of God; he is between it and us.” Its triangle transposes the Ruskin–La Touche affair of 1872.76
The Vicar’s Daughter (1872)#
At a glance. 3 vols. London: Tinsley Brothers, 1872; serialised in the Sunday Magazine, 1871–72; forty-four chapters; third of the Marshmallows books.
Plot and takeaway. Wynnie Percivale narrates her marriage to the poor painter, her London household and her moral education, whose centre is Marion Clare, a gentlewoman who lives among the poor of a London court as their teacher and friend — a portrait generally identified with Octavia Hill — and whose evenings among “her grandchildren” are Christianity in practice; the philanthropist Lady Bernard builds “a block of houses … planned under the instructions of Marion Clare” for her poor. Jeffrey Smith has studied it as MacDonald’s approach to Victorian social reform; its theology is service: the rich who make up to the poor for their wrongs “defend the Saviour in their persons from the tyranny of Mammon”.77
Malcolm (1875) and The Marquis of Lossie (1877)#
At a glance. Malcolm, 3 vols. London: Henry S. King, 1875 (issued 1874); seventy chapters; set in “Portlossie”, which is Cullen on the Banffshire coast. The Marquis of Lossie, 3 vols. London: Hurst & Blackett, 1877; seventy-two chapters.
Plot. Malcolm MacPhail, a fisher-lad of twenty, lives with his supposed grandfather Duncan, a blind Highland piper who hates all Campbells for Glencoe and has the second sight, which fades in “ta curset Lowlands” (“Foreseein’ ‘s no forefen’in’”). The Marquis of Lossie returns to the House with his daughter Lady Florimel, who plays with Malcolm’s love; the schoolmaster Mr Graham, a Platonist-mystic who “without having read a word of Swedenborg … was a believer in the absolute correspondence of the inward and outward”, is Malcolm’s teacher and is driven out for heresy; the hunchbacked “mad laird” Stephen Stewart, who cries “I dinna ken whaur I cam frae”, is hunted by his mother and protected by Malcolm. The housekeeper tells the legend of Lord Gernon, a fourteenth-century lord returned “from the East” who “practised unholy works”, commanded winds and lightning, “washed … in water medicated with distilments to prolong life”, searched for the philosopher’s stone, compelled a confession by “mysterious waftures of the hand”, and vanished in a sealed chamber from which cries were heard, leaving a rhymed prophecy — “The lord quha wad sup on 3 thowmes o’ cauld airn, / The ayr quha wad kythe a bastard and carena, / The mayd quha wad tyne her man and her bairn, / Lift the neck, and enter, and fearna” — which the plot fulfils point by point; Malcolm sleeps beside the wizard’s chamber and surprises the midwife Mrs Catanach in it. Duncan discloses that Malcolm was a foundling; letters prove that Griselda Campbell was the marquis’s secret wife and Malcolm their son, stolen at birth by Mrs Catanach; she shrieks the truth to Duncan: “He’s naething but ane o’ yer hatit Cawm’ells!” The mad laird dies in a vision — “Eh, the bonny man! The bonny man!”; the marquis, thrown by his mare and refusing amputation, is brought by Mr Graham to “It’s damned hard to be good” — “If there were but time to draw another breath, there would be time to begin” — blesses Malcolm without knowing him, and dies: “Malcolm, be good —”. Malcolm, now Marquis, keeps his rank secret and stays as a groom. In the sequel he follows Florimel to London as her groom on the demon mare Kelpie, rescues her from Lady Bellair and the fortune-hunter Liftore, interprets for her lover the painter Lenorme a picture of Novalis’s Isis unveiled, is befriended and converted-by-conversation by the philanthropic Lady Clementina, is poisoned with a “philtre” by Mrs Catanach and saved by a dream of his blind grandfather dashing the bottle to the floor, discloses himself at a great assembly, marries Clementina and Florimel to Lenorme in one ceremony, takes his bride to sleep in the Wizard’s Chamber, and becomes “the fisher king”, preaching to the fleet from the binnacle of the mission-boat Clemency.
Takeaway. Malcolm is MacDonald’s most complete portrait of the “natural” hero, and the book in which the Gothic-occult apparatus — the wizard-lord from the East, the alchemical chamber, the prophecy, the witch-midwife, the cloaked apparition, the Baillies’ Barn revival, the taibhsear’s second sight, Mr Graham’s correspondences — is at its densest; the mad laird’s “Whence?” and his death-vision of “the bonny man” are the metaphysical refrain that returns in Heather and Snow. Arnold Bennett listed it in Literary Taste (1909) among the books an English library should contain; Phillips’s first abridgement, The Fisherman’s Lady (1982), began the American revival, and The Marquis’ Secret followed.78
St George and St Michael (1876)#
At a glance. 3 vols. London: Henry S. King, 1876 (issued 1875); serialised in The Graphic; MacDonald’s only historical novel, with a closing note on its sources in Dircks’s life of the Marquis of Worcester and Dr Bayly’s Certamen Religiosum.
Plot and takeaway. Monmouthshire, 1641–46. Dorothy Vaughan, a Royalist, and Richard Heywood, a Puritan yeoman’s son, childhood sweethearts, are parted by the Civil War; Dorothy takes refuge at Raglan Castle with the old Catholic Marquis of Worcester and his son Lord Herbert, the author of A Century of Inventions, whose “fire-engine”, hydraulic “water-commanding fiend”, enchanted chair, mechanical bat and secret chamber make him the castle’s “magician”: “It is not outside the castle walls only that I am looked upon as a magician … Engines are as tickle to meddle with as incantations themselves.” A traitress is unmasked by a staged exorcism in which Herbert, in “an outlandish Persian hat” and hieroglyphic gown, casts a horoscope and releases the bat — “He was far less doubtful of astrology than of magic … In the present case, however, he trusted for success rather to his knowledge of human nature than to his questioning of the stars.” The siege and surrender of Raglan (“Domus Dissolvitur”), the old marquis’s death and the marriage of Dorothy and Richard across the divide close the book. Its interest is the theme of technology as licit “magic” against superstition, with a witch’s cottage, an “apparition”, the poet-physician Henry Vaughan, and religious tolerance as the moral. Abridged as The Last Castle.79
Thomas Wingfold, Curate (1876) and Paul Faber, Surgeon (1879)#
At a glance. Thomas Wingfold, Curate, 3 vols. London: Hurst & Blackett, 1876; serialised in The Day of Rest; set in “Glaston”. Paul Faber, Surgeon, 3 vols. London: Hurst & Blackett, 1879; dedicated “To W.C.T. Tuum est” with a sonnet signed from Porto Fino, December 1878 — presumably William Cowper-Temple.
Plot. Wingfold, a colourless curate preaching his uncle’s second-hand sermons, is challenged by the freethinker George Bascombe — “Tell me honestly — do you believe one word of all that!” — and is taken in hand by Joseph Polwarth, the asthmatic dwarf gate-keeper of Osterfield Park, and his crippled niece Rachel: “Take then your New Testament as if you had never seen it before, and read — to find out”; “there is an eternal law against all manner of humbug.” His first honest sermon asks, “‘Did I ever, in all my life, do one thing because he said to me DO THIS?’ And the answer was NO, NEVER.” Meanwhile Helen Lingard hides her half-brother Leopold, son of a Hindu mother and addicted to “a certain baneful drug”, who has stabbed his flirtatious beloved at a masked ball; Wingfold and Polwarth insist that his only salvation is confession to God and to the law; Leopold confesses, is released as mad through Bascombe’s management, and dies with Polwarth kneeling; Helen, humbled, asks Wingfold — “He didn’t leave my brother’s soul in hell, did he?” “If ever a soul was taken out of hell, it was Leopold’s” — to make her his disciple. In Paul Faber the handsome atheist surgeon of Glaston saves and marries Juliet Meredith, who conceals a pre-marital fall; when conscience and Wingfold’s preaching bring her to confess, the apostle of tolerance casts her out; she goes to drown herself in “the bottomless pool” and is hidden by the dissenting minister’s daughter Dorothy Drake; Faber, believing her dead, is broken into humility and confesses his own past — an unacknowledged child; Juliet, having borne a child, is restored: “Unconfessed to each other, their falls would forever have been between to part them; confessed, they drew them together.” “He was growing, and that is all we can require of any man.”
Takeaway. Lewis’s “supreme preacher” is at his most concentrated in the three Wingfold novels (the third is There and Back): obedience as the sole road to knowledge; confession against self-protection; the dwarf Polwarth as the book’s mystic, in whom deformity is the sign of spiritual straightness (“The prophetic in the uncle was the poetic in the niece”); Novalis quoted on the incarnation (“God can become whatever he can create”); and, in Paul Faber, MacDonald’s most sustained argument with scientific atheism and with the sexual double standard: “Apart from Himself, God forbid there should be any immortality.” Abridged as The Curate’s Awakening and The Lady’s Confession.80
Sir Gibbie (1879)#
At a glance. 3 vols. London: Hurst & Blackett, 1879; serialised in the Glasgow Weekly Mail; sixty-two chapters; set on “Daurside”, the Dee.
Plot. Gibbie, a mute, barefoot, radiantly loving waif of eight, is “wee Sir Gibbie”, son of a drunken baronet-cobbler who dies in his arms; he sleeps beside the black sailor Sambo, whose throat is cut by thieves as he watches, and flees up the river, living on the country, becoming the secret “broonie” of a farm, and being flogged nearly in two by the laird of Glashruach’s gamekeeper. On the mountain Glashgar the cottar-shepherds Robert and Janet Grant take him in; Janet, who reads only the gospels, receives him as she would the Lord — “To Janet, Jesus Christ was no object of so-called theological speculation, but a living man” — and their son Donal, a ploughboy-poet, teaches him to write. He saves the gamekeeper who shot him and frees him, because forgiveness is his to give; befriends the laird’s daughter Ginevra; and in the great flood rescues her from the collapsing house, rides the water and saves men and beasts. Found to be heir to a fortune, he is educated in the city, learns finger-speech, keeps his slum-loving heart, opens “the Auld Hoose o’ Galbraith” as a refuge for the houseless, proposes to Ginevra by slate when her ruined father would sell her to the popular preacher Fergus Duff, and marries her; Janet “went home first — ‘to be at han’,’ she said, ‘to open the door till him whan he chaps.’”
Takeaway. Gibbie is the holy innocent at his purest — “Gibbie’s merit and his grace were in inverse ratio. Few things were easier to him than to love his enemies” — and, with Janet praying aloud to “Jesus, the Saviour o’ man an’ beast”, the novel is the sermons’ universalism (“God has in his universe furnaces for the refining of gold, as well as for the burning of chaff”) and “the Theou logos against theology” in a Deeside cottage; the laird’s denunciation of the second sight as “wicked” is the book’s portrait of “poverty-stricken religion”. Lewis named its hero as the point where the novels approach fantasy; Elizabeth Yates abridged it in 1963 and Phillips as The Baronet’s Song.81
Mary Marston (1881), Castle Warlock (1882) and Weighed and Wanting (1882)#
At a glance. Mary Marston, 3 vols. London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1881. Castle Warlock: A Homely Romance, 3 vols. London: Sampson Low, 1882 (American edition as Warlock o’ Glenwarlock, Boston: Lothrop, 1881). Weighed and Wanting, 3 vols. London: Sampson Low, 1882.
Plot and takeaway. Mary Marston: the draper’s daughter of Testbridge keeps her saintly father’s shop, serves as companion to the aristocratic Hesper, sold by her mother to the roué Redmain, nurses the dying man, exposes a theft and marries a blacksmith-musician; its esoteric centre is “Mary’s Dream” after her father’s funeral, in which her dead brother, mother and father lead her through moonlit emptiness to a mountain of light where she is set on knees “like a child” and a voice says, “Poor child! something has closed the valve between her heart and mine” — MacDonald’s plainest dream-theophany. Castle Warlock: Cosmo, son of the poor old laird of Glenwarlock, is given by the mutterings of old Grannie the rhyme of a pirate great-uncle — “Catch yer naig an’ pu’ his tail: In his hin’ heel ca’ a nail; Rug his lugs frae ane anither — Stan’ up, an’ ca’ the king yer brither” — dreams the captain’s ghost leading him to the haunted guest-chamber in which Lord Mergwain, the pirate’s old crony, dies of terror; and, when debt threatens the estate after his father’s death, follows the rhyme to a wooden horse chained in a hidden stall and releases “a cataract as of shattered rainbows … a mound of stones of all the shapes into which diamonds are fashioned”, saves Glenwarlock, marries Lady Joan and closes the book with a poem: “All things are shadows of thee, Lord … Diamonds are shadows of the sun.” Wraiths, a second-sighted witch, ghosts and the “man of light” in the snow furnish it; the alchemy is the moral one of poverty and patience. Weighed and Wanting: Hester Raymount, a singer who would give her music to the poor, her weak brother Corney, and the visionary child Mark, who calls God “the great Think” — “if God were to go to sleep and forget his little Mark, then he would forget that he was God” — and who dies; Hester marries the slum-doctor Christopher (“Heaven-gate … opens inside us”) and is given a house and an income for her work. Abridged as A Daughter’s Devotion, The Laird’s Inheritance and The Gentlewoman’s Choice.82
Donal Grant (1883)#
At a glance. 3 vols. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, 1883; eighty-four chapters; sequel to Sir Gibbie.
Plot. Donal, the shepherd-poet, walks to the town of Auchars, lodges with the cobbler-mystic Andrew Comin and his wife, and becomes tutor to Davie, younger son of the Earl of Morven, at Castle Graham. The earl is a drug-eater who “made experiment” with “hardly any sort of narcotic”; the elder son seduces the cobbler’s granddaughter; Lady Arctura, the earl’s niece and the true owner of the castle, is tormented by her friend’s Calvinism and by “ghost-music” in the walls. Donal traces the music to an aeolian harp in a chimney and, with Arctura, discovers the “lost room”, the castle’s walled-up chapel with a chained skeleton on a bed: “This house is like every human soul … We have found the chapel of the house, the place they used to pray to God in, built up, lost, forgotten.” They bury the bones by night. The earl declares his heir a bastard, drugs Arctura and walls her alive in the chapel; Donal breaks through from the crypt “like a man rising from the dead”; Arctura, dying of the ordeal, marries him on her deathbed — “I shall not be far from you, dear, I think — sometimes at least … I shall laugh to myself to think how near I am, and you fancying me a long way off!” — and dies in his arms, leaving him everything, which he gives to the rightful heir. He keeps a school in the town and sits on Sundays in her rooms: “alone one may meet many, sitting still may travel far, and silent make the universe hear.”
Takeaway. The haunted house allegorised as the soul, the buried chapel, the ghost-music explained and retained, “A Talk about Ghosts” (necromancy could raise at best “a shadowy resemblance”), the nearness of the dead, and MacDonald’s most Gothic villain; Kegler reads its castle-landscape as Swedenborgian “extremities of invisible supernatural realities”. Its explicit rejection of “mere punishment” — “a human idea … But the consuming fire is more terrible than any punishment invented by riotous and cruel imagination” — is the sermons’ doctrine in the mouth of the hero. Abridged as The Shepherd’s Castle.83
What’s Mine’s Mine (1886)#
At a glance. 3 vols. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, 1886; fifty-five chapters; set in “Strathruadh” in the West Highlands.
Plot. The Macruadh, Alister, chief of a diminished clan, farms his remnant land with his mother and his brother Ian, a soldier lately in the Czar’s service, home from Moscow; the London distiller Peregrine Palmer has bought the old clan lands and built the New House, and his daughters Christina and Mercy walk the glen. Ian, the contemplative, tells the girls of the dead — “The ghosts are not dead … I am inclined to think some ghosts have to stay a while and look on” — and of the Russian girl he loved and who died: “beyond a doubt I love her now … Now we shall love each other for ever!”; Christina loves him hopelessly, and Alister wins Mercy against her father’s will. The deaf stag-hunter’s son Rob of the Angels, “a seer, one in communion with higher powers” (“in a lowland parish he would have been regarded as little better than a gifted idiot; in the mountains he was looked upon as a seer”), saves Christina on the hill. Rather than see his people cleared, Alister sells and leads the whole clan to Canada: “Where Jesus, the Son of God, is — there is my home! He is here, and he is over the sea, and my home is everywhere! I have lost my land and my country, but I take with me my people.” The clan prospers, strikes “rock oil”, and buys back the strath.
Takeaway. Ian Macruadh is MacDonald’s fullest mystic-hero, and his speeches are the entry’s clearest prose on the dead (“I look for the rest of more life, more strength, more love. But God is not shut up in heaven, neither is there one law of life there and another here”), on nature as “the living garment” of a personal God — “Whatever influences us must be a person. But God is the only real person … She always seems to me a beautiful old grandmother” — and on his dream of riding the Earth, whose face is “the face of a woman, grand and beautiful … one of the faces of the living God”; “Our dependence is our eternity … we must dwell in houses of infinite dependence, or sit alone in the waste of a godless universe.” The novel is also a Clearances novel and a study of the second sight, the “ghostly funeral” and the nearness of the dead in a Highland household. Abridged as The Highlander’s Last Song.84
Home Again (1887), The Elect Lady (1888) and A Rough Shaking (1890)#
At a glance. Home Again: A Tale. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, 1887. The Elect Lady. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, 1888. A Rough Shaking. London: Blackie, 1891 (issued 1890); dedicated to the author’s great-nephew Norman MacKay Binney, “aged seven”.
Plot and takeaway. Home Again is a short parable of a farmer’s son who goes to London to be a poet, is used by the literary Lady Lufa whose bad verse he over-praises, and comes home disgraced to his father and to the girl who loves him: honesty in criticism and the prodigal’s return. The Elect Lady sets Andrew Ingram, a ploughman-poet whose religion is practice without sect — “I thought you were an Arminian, another time a Socinian, then a Swedenborgian, then an Arian! I read a history of the sects of the middle ages, just to see where I could set you down” — against a miser-laird who secretly owns a jewelled chalice made for Clement VII and dies clutching it; the servant Dawtie, “a country girl of pure conscience”, who has seen him with the cup and urged him to restore it, is tried for its theft and gets “the uncomfortable verdict of ‘Not Proven’”; Andrew, who married her before the trial (“Jesus went home without a character, and was well received”), dies in middle age, and the laird’s daughter, who loved him, lives on with his widow: “Such a friend as Andrew was better than such a husband as George.” Andrew’s is the obedience-mysticism in its purest prose form: “God’s secrets … He was telling them as fast as He could get his children to understand them.” A Rough Shaking is a boys’ book about an orphan of an Italian earthquake who grows up among animals and finds his father at sea, with the animal question stated on its first page: “there are men who believe in no animal rights, or in any God of the animals, and think we may do what we please with them, indulging at their cost an insane thirst after knowledge. Injustice may discover facts, but never truth.” Abridged as The Poet’s Homecoming and The Landlady’s Master.85
There and Back (1891)#
At a glance. 3 vols. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1891; sixty-six chapters; the third Wingfold novel.
Plot and takeaway. Sir Wilton Lestrange’s infant son by his first wife, a blacksmith’s daughter, is carried off by a nurse to save him from the second wife and raised as Richard Tuke, a London bookbinder’s son and an unbeliever; sent to rebind the library at Mortgrange, he meets the wild, frank heiress Barbara Wylder and is worked on by Wingfold, now rector, through “The Parson’s Parable” and Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner; his atheism is worn down by Barbara and by suffering (“To be redeemed, one must redeem”); a sealed will restores him as Sir Richard and he marries Barbara. The last chapter, “Barbara’s Dream”, explains the title: she leans against the Father’s black-robed form and sees into his heart “all human hearts … folded warm and soft, safe and glad”: “To have been there and to have come back, was the misery.” Abridged as The Baron’s Apprenticeship.86
Heather and Snow (1893)#
At a glance. 2 vols. London: Chatto & Windus, 1893; New York: Harper, 1893; forty-five chapters; set at Corbyknowe in Aberdeenshire.
Plot and takeaway. Kirsty Barclay, daughter of an old soldier-farmer, keeps her “innocent” brother Steenie, “Dog-Steenie” by day and “Man-Steenie” by night on the hill, who sees “the bonny man”: “It’s a bonny day, the day the bonny man bides in! … the bonny nicht comes straucht up to me, and into me, and gangs a’ throuw me, and bides i’ me; and syne I luik for the bonny man!”; “I ken naething aboot eternity. I’m thinkin it’ll a’ turn intil a lown starry nicht, wi’ the bonny man intil’t.” Francis Gordon, the young laird whom Kirsty loves, trifles with her friend Phemy and abducts her; Kirsty horsewhips him and leaves him on the Horn “wi’ my Maker to mak a man o’ me”; in the great snow Steenie rescues Phemy and dies of a “bluid-brak” in the earth-house he called his own: “He maun be sair at hame wi’ the bonny man!” Francis returns from the army transformed, and on the Horn Kirsty crowns him with her hands — “Ye hae set yersel to du his wull, and no yer ain: ye’re a king; and for want o’ a better croon, I croon ye wi my twa han’s” (with MacDonald’s own gloss comparing the scene to Virgil’s crowning of Dante at the top of Purgatory) — and marries him. Steenie is the purest of the holy fools, and his visions are given without irony as true sight. Abridged as The Peasant Girl’s Dream.87
Salted With Fire (1897) and Far Above Rubies (1898)#
At a glance. Salted with Fire. London: Hurst & Blackett, 1897; twenty-six chapters; the title from Mark 9:49; MacDonald’s last full novel. Far Above Rubies. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1898; a short tale first printed in The Sketch, never issued in book form in Britain; his last work.
Plot and takeaway. James Blatherwick, a farmer’s son newly licensed minister of Tiltowie and vain of his “honour”, has seduced and abandoned a servant, Isy, who bears his child, wanders, leaves the baby and is taken in, unknowing, by his own mother. The soutar MacLear, “what the parson called a mystic, and … the most practical man in the neighbourhood”, whose Lord “was with him, had come to visit him — yet was never far from him”, and his daughter Maggie foster the child; the soutar, with “a certain something … not unlike a spirit of prophecy”, divines the minister’s guilt and prays “Lord, pu’ doon the dyke o’ learnin and self-richteousness”; confronted by his father, James breaks, confesses, marries Isy and resigns; the synod renews his licence and sends him to “the poorest and most populous parish north of the Tweed”. His closing speech is MacDonald’s last theodicy: “The evil in me had to come out and show itself, before it could be cleared away … God chooses to be good, else he would not be God: man must choose to be good, else he cannot be the son of God! … If at last it should prove possible for a created being to see good and evil as they are, and choose the evil, then, and only then, there would, I presume, be nothing left for God but to set his foot upon him and crush him … But God is deeper in us than our own life.” The soutar is the summation of the cobbler-mystics, and the “salt of fire” is purgatorial love: “the love of God … becomes a consuming fire.” Far Above Rubies, the story of a young Celtic poet and beginning novelist and the wife whose faith carries him through poverty and a rejected manuscript, is an autobiographical retrospect of MacDonald’s own beginnings, closing with Hamlet’s “in my heart’s core, aye, in my heart of hearts!” Abridged as The Minister’s Restoration.88
Sermons, Criticism, and Essays#
Unspoken Sermons, First Series (1867), Second Series (1885), Third Series (1889)#
At a glance. Unspoken Sermons. London: Alexander Strahan, 1867; twelve sermons; on the title-page the Greek epigraph “Ἔπεα Ἄπτερα” — “wingless words”, the reversal of Homer’s “winged words”, that is, words that have not flown from the mouth — and the motto “Comfort ye, comfort ye my people”; dedicated “These Ears of Corn, gathered and rubbed in my hands upon broken Sabbaths, I offer first to my Wife, and then to my other Friends.” Unspoken Sermons, Second Series. London: Longmans, Green, 1885; twelve sermons; “These also / after eighteen years / to / my wife / Coraggio, Bordighera / January 1885”. Unspoken Sermons, Third Series. London: Longmans, Green, 1889; twelve sermons; “To my wife. / Sun and wind and rain, the Lord / Is to seed his Father buried; / For he is the living Word, / And the quickening Spirit. / Bordighera / May 3, 1889”. “Unspoken” because written for readers by a man who had no pulpit; MacDonald preached often enough by invitation, and two spoken sermons survive in A Dish of Orts, but these were composed for the press. Ruskin wrote of the first series that “They are the best sermons — beyond all compare — I have ever read, and if ever sermons did good, these will”; Lewis, who drew his Anthology of 1946 chiefly from the three series, wrote that “My own debt to this book is almost as great as one man can owe to another.”89
Argument: the First Series. The twelve sermons of 1867 lay down the foundations in an order that is itself an argument. “The Child in the Midst” (Mark 9:33–37) establishes that “the childlike is the divine” and ends by handing on to “The Consuming Fire” (Hebrews 12:29), which defines God’s love as the fire that “will burn us until we worship” and prays for the day when Death and Hell are cast “into thine own consuming self”. “The Higher Faith” (John 20:29) subordinates the Bible to Christ — “the moon of our darkness … not … the sun” — and claims for hope the right to outrun promise: “Shall God’s thoughts be surpassed by man’s thoughts? God’s giving by man’s asking? God’s creation by man’s imagination? No.” “It Shall Not Be Forgiven” (Luke 12:10) holds that “Our Lord had no design of constructing a system of truth in intellectual forms”, defines forgiveness as “love towards the unlovely” and Christ as “God’s Forgiveness”, declares that “All sin is unpardonable. There is no compromise to be made with it. We shall not come out except clean, except having paid the uttermost farthing”, and identifies the unforgivable sins as the two conditions — unforgivingness and the denial of known truth — that “shut God out altogether”, and which are unforgivable only while they last: “Out of that they must come.” “The New Name” (Revelation 2:17) gives the doctrine of the individual and the definition of mysticism; “The Heart with the Treasure” (Matthew 6:19–21) warns that the immortal, housed with the corrupting, “creeps, that it may share with them, into a burrow in the earth, where its budded wings wither”; “The Temptation in the Wilderness” (Matthew 4:1–11) argues that “A man does not live by his feelings any more than by bread, but by the Truth, that is, the Word, the Will, the uttered Being of God”, and that “Inward sight alone can convince of truth; signs and wonders never”; “The Eloi” (Matthew 27:46) treats the cry of dereliction as the triumph of the Son’s will in the absence of all feeling — “Never was God nearer him than now” — and draws the rule for the believer’s desolation: “Troubled soul, thou art not bound to feel, but thou art bound to arise … Heed not thy feelings: Do thy work.” “The Hands of the Father” (Luke 23:46) makes every highest act “a giving back to God of that which he first gave to us”; “Love Thy Neighbour” defines the neighbour as “the man who is next to you at the moment”, love as “the creator of law”, and heaven as impossible to any who could say of the lost, “they are our neighbours no more”: “St. Paul would be wretched before the throne of God, if he thought there was one man beyond the pale of his mercy”; “Love Thine Enemy” sends the unforgiving to learn “of God in hell what thou didst refuse to learn of him upon the gentle-toned earth”; and “The God of the Living” (Luke 20:38) closes with the resurrection: “With Him death is not … This that we call death, is but a form in the eyes of men.”
The Second Series. The sermons of 1885 turn from the foundations to the way. “The Way” and “The Hardness of the Way” read the rich young ruler from the revised text — “Why askest thou me concerning that which is good? One there is who is good” — and conclude that “A condition of things in which it would be easy for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven is to me inconceivable”; “Things can never be really possessed by the man who cannot do without them”; “Not all the merits of God and his Christ can give you eternal life; only God and his Christ can; and they cannot, would not if they could, without your keeping the commandments.” “The Cause of Spiritual Stupidity” (Mark 8:21) finds it in “Things” — “If it be Things that slay you, what matter whether things you have, or things you have not?” — and declares that “Distrust is atheism, and the barrier to all growth”. “The Word of Jesus on Prayer” and “Man’s Difficulty concerning Prayer” (Luke 18:1) contain “Obedience is the one key of life”, the definition of communion with God as “the one need of the soul beyond all other need”, the claim that God “may keep his plans in a measure unfixed, waiting the free desire of the individual soul”, the doctrine that “Death is not an impervious wall; through it, beyond it, go the prayers”, and the observation that “with a right understanding of it, we might as well pray for God’s vengeance as for his forgiveness; that vengeance is, to destroy the sin”. “The Last Farthing” (Matthew 5:26) is the anatomy of the outer darkness; “Abba, Father!” (Romans 8:15) the refutation of “adoption” and the promise that “the whole creation” will find “its freedom in their freedom”; “Life” (John 10:10) the metaphysics of creation and of the will; “The Fear of God” (Revelation 1:17–18) the fire that “is only at a distance it burns”; “The Voice of Job” (Job 14:13–15) MacDonald’s boldest exegesis — “The book of Job seems to me the most daring of poems: from a position of the most vantageless realism, it assaults the very citadel of the ideal!”; Job’s friends are “men who would rather receive salvation from God, than God their salvation”; Job “implies, if he does not actually say, that God owes something to his creature. This is the beginning of the greatest discovery of all — that God owes himself to the creature he has made in his image”; and he “would gladly throw out the part of Elihu as an interpolation”. “Self-Denial” (Luke 9:23–24) defines “the world” as “all ways of judging, regarding, and thinking … which are not divine”, and prophesies that “Good souls many will one day be horrified at the things they now believe of God”; and “The Truth in Jesus” (Ephesians 4:20–22) — “How have we learned Christ? It ought to be a startling thought, that we may have learned him wrong” — is the sermon of obedience and of MacDonald’s confession that his strife with penal Calvinism was “One of my earliest recollections”.
The Third Series. The sermons of 1889 are the metaphysics. “The Creation in Christ” (John 1:3–4) and “The Knowing of the Son” set out the eternal Sonship and the self-refusal that “corresponds to the creation of God”; “The Mirrors of the Lord” (2 Corinthians 3:18) the receiving mirror; “The Truth” (John 14:6) the ascending stair from fact to the divine idea — “The truth of every man, I say, is the perfected Christ in him” — and its freedom: “When a man is true, if he were in hell he could not be miserable.” “Freedom” (John 8:32–36) reads “Everyone committing sin is a slave” and finds that “Christ died to save us, not from suffering, but from ourselves; not from injustice, far less from justice, but from being unjust”; “Kingship” (John 18:37) states “the one principle of hell” and that Jesus, crowned in mockery, “was the only real king that ever sat on any throne”, adding the rule of witness: “We are not bound to say all we think, but we are bound not even to look what we do not think.” “Justice” (Psalm 62:12), the longest, is the repudiation of penal substitution and the credo; “Light” (1 John 1:5) is its cry — “Away with your doctrines! Away with your salvation from the ‘justice’ of a God whom it is a horror to imagine! Away with your iron cages of false metaphysics! I am saved — for God is light!”; “Whatever seems to me darkness, that I will not believe of my God.” “The Displeasure of Jesus” (John 11:33) argues on the Greek that Jesus at Bethany “was moved with indignation”, not that he “groaned”, and finds it “an especially glad thought that the Lord came so near us as to be angry with us”; “Righteousness” (Philippians 3:8–9) disposes of imputed righteousness — “Believe in Moloch if you will, but call him Moloch, not Justice”; “The Final Unmasking” (Matthew 10:26) holds that “God is not a God that hides, but a God that reveals”, that “the supremely terrible revelation is that of a man to himself”, and that “The severest punishment that can be inflicted upon the wrongdoer is simply to let him know what he is; for his nature is of God, and the deepest in him is the divine”; and “The Inheritance” (Colossians 1:12) closes the three series with heaven as “continuous touch with God” — “All the light is ours. God is all ours. Even that in God which we cannot understand is ours” — and with the hope of being able, beyond death, to say “I am sorry; forgive me.”
Takeaway. The thirty-six sermons are the doctrinal core of everything MacDonald wrote and the text through which his theology reached the twentieth century. Their method — a text of Scripture, a refusal of “system”, an argument from the character of God as Father, and a turn in every case from believing to doing — is the same in 1867 and in 1889, and their doctrine is the one set out under Thought above. Lewis’s three hundred and sixty-five extracts of 1946 are drawn from them almost entirely; the Anthology’s preface calls MacDonald’s prose “undistinguished, at times fumbling” and the sermons the exception, and adds, “Nowhere else outside the New Testament have I found terror and comfort so intertwined.”90
The Miracles of Our Lord (1870)#
At a glance. London: Strahan, 1870; dedicated “To F. D. Maurice, honoured of God, I humbly offer this book”; twelve chapters, classified by the mode of the miracle — the beginning of miracles at Cana; the cure of Simon’s wife’s mother; miracles of healing unsolicited, solicited by the sufferers, and granted to the prayer of friends; the casting out of devils; the raising of the dead; the government of nature; miracles of destruction; the Resurrection; the Transfiguration — and written, MacDonald notes, at request: “I have been requested to write some papers on our Lord’s miracles.”
Argument. The miracles are “the works of the Father done in little … an epitome of God’s processes in nature beheld in immediate connection with their source — a source as yet lost to the eyes and too often to the hearts of men in the far-receding gradations of continuous law. That men might see the will of God at work, Jesus did the works of his Father thus.” His “miracles in bread and in wine were far less grand and less beautiful than the works of the Father they represented, in making the corn to grow in the valleys, and the grapes to drink the sunlight on the hill-sides of the world”; all had “the one root, obedience”; and those who see only “a violation of the laws of nature” may come to recognise “at least a possible fulfilment of her deepest laws” — “only a hastening of appearances; the doing of that in a day, which may ordinarily take a thousand years”. “I do not myself believe that he valued the working of these miracles as he valued the utterance of the truth in words.” The legend that Jesus “was never known to smile” is “an utter falsehood”; the question of possession “has nothing whatever to do with” the existence of a personal devil, and though the disease-interpretation is “nothing unchristian”, “to me the marvellous is not therefore incredible”; “No poet of high rank, as far as I know, ever disbelieved in the future. He might fear that there was none; but that very fear is faith”; destruction “is one of the phases of creation … As a poet drawing his pen through syllable or word that mars his clear utterance or musical comment, such is the destruction of the Maker. It is the indrawn sigh of the creating Breath”; and “distinctly do I hold that he took again the same body in which he had walked about on the earth.” The epilogue on the Transfiguration is MacDonald’s boldest speculation: “This border-land, this touching of what we call mind and matter, is the region of miracles — of material creation, I might have said, which is the great — suspect, the only miracle. But if matter be the outcome of spirit, and body and soul be one man, then, if the soul be radiant of truth, what can the body do but shine?”; “I conjecture then, that truth, which is light in the soul, might not only cast out disease, which is darkness in the body, but change that body even, without the intervention of death, into the likeness of the body of Jesus … Except by violence I do not think the body of Jesus could have died … I think a perfect soul would be capable of keeping its body alive”; “Such a body might well walk upon the stormiest waters.” “But I find myself in regions where I dare tread no further for the darkness of ignorance. Even so come, Lord Jesus.”
Takeaway. The book is the physics of MacDonald’s sacramental universe: nature as the Father’s slow miracle, the miracle as nature hastened, and the glorified body as the natural outcome of a soul “radiant of truth”. Daniel Gabelman has read it as “divine alchemy”.91
England’s Antiphon (1868)#
At a glance. London: Macmillan, 1868, in the “Sunday Library”; reissued 1874; an anthology with commentary of English religious lyric from the thirteenth century to Tennyson in twenty-three chapters — the sacred lyrics of the thirteenth century, the miracle plays, the fifteenth century, Spenser and his friends, Bacon, Donne, Hall and Sandys, the Elizabethan dramatists, Beaumont and Drummond, the Fletchers, Wither, Herrick and Quarles, Herbert, Milton, Waller, Browne and Jeremy Taylor, Henry More and Baxter, Crashaw and Marvell, “A Mount of Vision — Henry Vaughan”, “The Plain” (Addison, Watts, Wesley, Byrom), “The Roots of the Hills”, “The New Vision” (Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge), “The Fervour of the Implicit” (Keble, Newman, Faber) and “The Questioning Fervour” (In Memoriam). “Antiphon means the responsive song of the parted choir”; “Heartily do I throw this my small pebble at the head of the great Sabbath-breaker Schism.”
Argument and takeaway. The book is MacDonald’s poetics and his map of the English mystical tradition. “The heart of poetry is indeed truth, but its garments are music, and the garments come first in the process of revelation. The music of a poem is its meaning in sound as distinguished from word … The sound of a verse is the harbinger of the truth contained therein.” Herbert is “a poet indeed! … If I begin with that which first in the nature of things ought to be demanded of a poet, namely, Truth, Revelation — George Herbert offers us measure pressed down and running over”; “The Elixir” is glossed by the philosopher’s stone. On the mystical school of More and Vaughan the passage quoted under Thought lays down the law of symbol and its corruption, with Swedenborg as the “European master of the order” whose highest writings “are rich in truth” and whose lowest “are poverty-stricken indeed”; “The mystical philosophy seems to me safe enough in the hands of a poet: with others it may degenerate into dank and dusty materialism.” Henry Vaughan “belongs to the mystical school, but his poetry rules his theories … He develops his mysticism upwards, with relation to his higher nature alone: it blossoms into poetry. His twin-brother Thomas developed his mysticism downwards in the direction of the material sciences — a true effort still, but one in which the danger of ceasing to be true increases.” Byrom came “under the influence, probably through William Law, of the writings of Jacob Böhme, the marvellous shoemaker of Görlitz”, and “the mystical thinker will ever be found the reviver of religious poetry”. Crashaw is “one of the loveliest of our angel-birds”; of Blake, “We cannot tell sometimes whether to attribute the bewilderment the poems cause in us to a mysticism run wild, or to regard it as the reflex of madness in the writer.” The conclusion traces “the course of the religious poetry of England, from simple song … through the chant of philosophy, to the full-toned lyric of adoration”, its sinking “in the sands of an evil taste generated by the worship of power and knowledge”, and its return by “the love of nature — beauty counteracting not contradicting science” to faith in some and “a holy questioning in others; the one class having for its faith, the other for its hope, that the heart of the Father is a heart like ours”.92
Orts (1882) and A Dish of Orts: Chiefly Papers on the Imagination, and on Shakspere (1893)#
At a glance. Orts. London: Sampson Low, 1882. A Dish of Orts. London: Sampson Low, Marston, 1893, “enlarged”, with a preface dated Edenbridge, Kent, 5 August 1893, explaining that the title does not mean “worthlessness” but “fragmentary presentments of larger meditation”. Fourteen papers: “The Imagination: Its Functions and Its Culture” (1867); “A Sketch of Individual Development” (1880); “St. George’s Day, 1564” (1864); “The Art of Shakspere, as Revealed by Himself” (1863); “The Elder Hamlet” (1875); “On Polish” (1865); “Browning’s ‘Christmas Eve’” (1853); reviews of T. T. Lynch’s Essays on Some of the Forms of Literature and J. Rutherfurd Russell’s History and Heroes of Medicine; “Wordsworth’s Poetry” (“Delivered extempore at Manchester”); “Shelley”; “A Sermon” (the spoken sermon of 1879 at the Unitarian chapel in Essex Street, on Philippians 3:15–16, which MacDonald wished had been titled “True Greatness”); “True Christian Ministering” (“a spoken sermon”); and, added in 1893, “The Fantastic Imagination”.
Argument and takeaway. The two essays on the imagination and the lecture on Wordsworth are set out under Thought. “A Sketch of Individual Development” (1880) traces the growth of a soul from the infant’s “atmosphere of love” — “the sky over him is his mother’s face; the earth that nourishes him is his mother’s bosom” — through the “second birth” of self-consciousness (“When a man not only lives, but knows that he lives, then first the possibility of a real life commences”), the “third birth” of conscience at the mother’s first opposing glance, science’s “stony look — ah, God! of soulless law”, the awakening of love, the approach of death, and the “vague legendary murmur” of “a man, represented as at least greater, stronger, and better than any other man”, to the crisis: “if here the man sets himself honestly to do the thing the Son of Man tells him, he so, and so first, sets out positively upon the path which … will conduct him to a knowledge of the whole matter; not until then is he a disciple … Obedience alone can convince.” Its credo — “at the heart of things and causing them to be, at the centre of monad, of world, of protoplastic mass, of loving dog, and of man most cruel, is an absolute, perfect love; and that in the man Christ Jesus this love is with us men to take us home … To the man who believes in the Son of God, poetry returns in a mighty wave; history unrolls itself in harmony; science shows crowned with its own aureole of holiness” — is the sermons compressed. “The Elder Hamlet” holds that “The ghost in ‘Hamlet’ is as faithfully treated as any character in the play. Next to Hamlet himself, he is to me the most interesting person of the drama”; “Shelley” that “one can hardly help feeling what a Christian he would have been, could he but have seen Christianity in any other way than through the traditional and practical misrepresentations of it which surrounded him”; “On Polish” defines polish as “that condition of surface which allows the inner structure of the material to manifest itself”; “Browning’s ‘Christmas Eve’” opens with Goethe’s “Poems are painted window-panes”; and the review of Russell’s History and Heroes of Medicine pauses over van Helmont’s archeus. “A Sermon”: “Knowledge is not necessarily light; and it is light, not knowledge, that we have to diffuse … Beyond all doing of good is the being good.”93
The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke: A Study With the Text of the Folio of 1623 (1885)#
At a glance. London: Longmans, Green, 1885; dedicated from Bordighera, Christmas 1884, “to my honoured relative Alexander Stewart MacColl, a little less than kin, and more than kind, to whom I owe in especial the true understanding of the great soliloquy”; the First Folio text “letter for letter, point for point”, with the Second Quarto’s variants in the margin and MacDonald’s commentary at the foot. “By this edition of Hamlet I hope to help the student of Shakspere to understand the play — and first of all Hamlet himself, whose spiritual and moral nature are the real material of the tragedy, to which every other interest of the play is subservient.” The fruit of thirty years’ lecturing on the play: Hamlet is read as a man of conscience who will not act on a ghost’s word until it is verified. Greville records that “it was condemned and passed by”.94
The Hope of the Gospel (1892)#
At a glance. London: Ward, Lock, Bowden, 1892; twelve sermons — “Salvation from Sin”, “The Remission of Sins”, “Jesus in the World”, “Jesus and his Fellow Townsmen”, “The Heirs of Heaven and Earth”, “Sorrow the Pledge of Joy”, “God’s Family”, “The Reward of Obedience”, “The Yoke of Jesus”, “The Salt and the Light of the World”, “The Right Hand and the Left” and “The Hope of the Universe”.
Argument. Salvation is from sin itself, not its consequences (“Help us to repent even to the sending away of our sins”); “God and man must combine for salvation from sin”; the divergent texts of Isaiah in the synagogue at Nazareth “ought to be enough in itself to do away with the spiritually vulgar notion of the verbal inspiration of the Scriptures”; Jesus stops before “the day of vengeance”, for “God’s vengeance is as holy a thing as his love, yea, is love”; “we shall not fail of help to believe because we doubt”. The meek inherit the earth because to them “the world yields thought after thought of delight … in the very temple of God”; “There is no evil in sorrow … More of sorrowful than of joyful men are always standing about the everlasting doors”; “The gladsome child runs farther afield; the wounded child turns to go home”; “Mercy cannot get in where mercy goes not out … The greatest mercy that can be shown to man, is to make him merciful; therefore, if he will not be merciful, the mercy of God must compel him thereto”; “all the saltness of the moral salt lies in the will to be salt”. The last sermon, “The Hope of the Universe” (Romans 8:19), is the fullest statement of MacDonald’s hope for the animals and “the whole creation” — “Their immortality is no new faith with me, but as old as my childhood”; “to believe in immortality for yourself, and not care to believe in it for the sparrow, would be simply hard-hearted and selfish”; “why a new race of animals, and not the old ones glorified?”; the speculation that lower forms may “pass upward through a succession of bettering embodiments”, and men who fail their rank be “degraded”; the attack on vivisection (“Torture can be inflicted only by the superior”; “Every gain of injustice is a loss to the world”); and the close: “To those who expect a world to come, I say then, Let us take heed how we carry ourselves to the creation which is to occupy with us the world to come. To those whose hearts are sore for that creation, I say, The Lord is mindful of his own, and will save both man and beast.”
Takeaway. The volume completes the sermons with the two doctrines the earlier series had left in the margin: that the Sermon on the Mount is the whole of the “hope of the gospel”, and that the hope reaches the beasts. It was reissued in 2023 with an introduction by Kirstin Jeffrey Johnson.95
Prefaces, Lectures, and Posthumous Collections#
MacDonald’s preface of 1885 to the anonymous Danish Letters from Hell, a book “that attracted more notice than Lilith” and was widely attributed to him, praised it for “the awful verity, that we make our fate in unmaking ourselves; that men, in defacing the image of God in themselves, construct for themselves a world of horror and dismay”. The lectures — on Burns, Dante, Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear, The Tempest, In Memoriam, Hood, Wordsworth, Browning’s Saul and Christmas Eve, Milton, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats and Sidney, and on “the Imagination” — survive only in newspaper reports, which Barbara Amell’s Wingfold has been printing since 1993. Twenty transcripts of sermons actually preached were collected as George MacDonald in the Pulpit: The “Spoken” Sermons of George MacDonald (Whitethorn, CA: Johannesen, 1996). The theological writings have been continuously reprinted: Johannesen’s “Sunrise Centenary Editions” reproduce the original texts; Rolland Hein’s Creation in Christ (1976) and Michael Phillips’s Bethany House selections (Discovering the Character of God, 1989; Knowing the Heart of God, 1990) abridge them; and The Gospel in George MacDonald (Plough, 2016) draws on the novels, fairy tales and sermons together.96
Reception and Significance#
In his lifetime MacDonald was read as a novelist and a preacher, and the fairy tales were read to children. Phantastes disappointed its publisher and puzzled its reviewers; David Elginbrod was greeted by The Times as “the work of a man of genius” and by The Reader as two books awkwardly joined, one of them a failure; Alec Forbes and Robert Falconer made him a leading Scottish novelist of the 1860s; the American tour of 1872–73 “filled halls with literally thousands”, and Redpath regretted the fee; the Civil List pension of 1877 recognised a writer of the second rank whose books did not pay. Ruskin called the first Unspoken Sermons “the best sermons — beyond all compare — I have ever read” and praised the Diary of an Old Soul in his Oxford lectures of 1884; Lewis Carroll took his family’s verdict on Alice; Tennyson borrowed his Ossian; Twain thought Robert Falconer “self-righteous humbug” and its verse “hogwash”, and was moved at the end of his life by his dead daughter’s copy of At the Back of the North Wind. The Hamlet of 1885 “was condemned and passed by”; Lilith “attracted little notice”. The obituaries of 1905 remembered a Scottish novelist, a religious teacher who had lost a pulpit for his hopes of the heathen, and the friend of Maurice and Ruskin.97
The twentieth century reversed the order. Greville MacDonald’s George MacDonald and His Wife (1924), with an introduction by G. K. Chesterton, made the case for the fantasies; Chesterton, who wrote in his Autobiography of the optimistic theism he had learned in childhood “under the glamorous mysticism of George Macdonald” — “Its Universalism was a sort of optimistic Calvinism” — testified in 1924 that The Princess and the Goblin “has made a difference to my whole existence, which helped me to see things in a certain way from the start”, found in its stairs that “do not lead to the usual landings” the truest picture of life he knew, and described its author as “a St. Francis of Aberdeen” who “evolved out of his own mystical meditations a complete alternative theology leading to a completely contrary mood” and “stands for a rather important turning-point in the history of Christendom”. The often-quoted sentence in which Chesterton is said to call MacDonald “one of the three or four greatest men of the nineteenth century” has not been traced to any of his writings. C. S. Lewis, who had bought the Everyman Phantastes on Leatherhead station in March 1916 — “I saw the bright shadow coming out of the book into the real world and resting there, transforming all common things and yet itself unchanged”; “That night my imagination was, in a certain sense, baptized; the rest of me, not unnaturally, took longer” — set a sentence of “The Consuming Fire” at the head of The Problem of Pain (1940), made MacDonald the guide of The Great Divorce (1945), where the narrator tells him that Phantastes had done for him what Beatrice did for Dante and where MacDonald’s voice declines to say whether all will be saved, and in George MacDonald: An Anthology (1946) wrote the preface that has governed all later reading: “I have never concealed the fact that I regarded him as my master; indeed I fancy I have never written a book in which I did not quote from him”; “What it actually did to me was to convert, even to baptize (that was where the Death came in) my imagination”; “The quality which had enchanted me in his imaginative works turned out to be the quality of the real universe, the divine, magical, terrifying and ecstatic reality in which we all live”; “What he does best is fantasy — fantasy that hovers between the allegorical and the mythopoeic. And this, in my opinion, he does better than any man”; “I know hardly any other writer who seems to be closer, or more continually close, to the Spirit of Christ Himself.” Lewis’s White Witch is “of Lilith’s line”, and the debts of the Narnia books and of That Hideous Strength to the Curdie books have been traced by Kirstin Jeffrey Johnson. W. H. Auden, introducing The Visionary Novels of George MacDonald (1954) — Lilith and Phantastes — judged him “pre-eminently a mythopoeic writer” and, “In his power … to project his inner life into images, events, beings, landscapes which are valid for all … one of the most remarkable writers of the nineteenth century”. J. R. R. Tolkien’s relation was the reverse of Lewis’s: “On Fairy-Stories” (1947) praised “The Golden Key” as a story “of power and beauty” and judged Lilith a partial failure; asked in 1964 to write a preface for an American edition of “The Golden Key”, he replied that “I am not as warm an admirer of George MacDonald as C. S. Lewis was”, re-read him with “distaste”, abandoned the preface, and wrote Smith of Wootton Major instead; in 1967 he told an interviewer, “I don’t like George MacDonald very much; he’s a horrible old grandmother”, while conceding that MacDonald’s animate trees had “perhaps some remote influence” on the Ents. Madeleine L’Engle’s “the grandfather of us all” and Oswald Chambers’s regret that MacDonald’s books “have been so neglected” are widely quoted and imperfectly sourced. David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus (1920) is the other line of descent, and the Encyclopedia of Fantasy pairs the two.98
Academic study began with Robert Lee Wolff’s The Golden Key: A Study of the Fiction of George MacDonald (1961), a Freudian reading of the fantasies as the working-out of an unresolved attachment to the dead mother and the stern father, hostile to the theology and indispensable as the first full critical survey; Richard Reis’s Twayne volume (1972) gave the first balanced short account. Stephen Prickett placed MacDonald in the Coleridge–Wordsworth–Maurice tradition of the religious imagination (Romanticism and Religion, 1976; Victorian Fantasy, 1979) and presided over the George MacDonald Society until his death in 2020; Rolland Hein’s The Harmony Within: The Spiritual Vision of George MacDonald (1982) and George MacDonald: Victorian Mythmaker (1993) made the sacramental reading standard in America and produced the variorum Lilith (1997); Colin Manlove’s chapters in Modern Fantasy (1975) and Christian Fantasy (1992), his Scotland’s Forgotten Treasure (2016) and George MacDonald’s Children’s Fantasies and the Divine Imagination (2019) are the fullest literary criticism of the romances; William Raeper’s George MacDonald (1987) was the first biography since Greville’s and The Gold Thread (1990) the first essay collection; David Robb’s George MacDonald (1987) claimed him for Scottish literature against the “kailyard” dismissal; Michael Phillips’s biography (1987) accompanied the Bethany House abridgements that from 1982 carried the novels to an American evangelical readership and, more recently, his “Cullen Collection”. The scholarship of the esoteric strands is almost entirely internal to MacDonald studies: Dale Nelson on Boehme and Law (1989); Adelheid Kegler on Neoplatonism, Swedenborg and European Symbolism (1991, 2002, 2005); John Docherty on the Carroll friendship (1995); Fernando Soto on the chthonic goddess of Phantastes (2000); Aren Roukema on its alchemy (2012); Bonnie Gaarden’s The Christian Goddess (2011) on the feminine figures as archetypes; Kerry Dearborn’s Baptized Imagination: The Theology of George MacDonald (2006) on the Trinitarian and sacramental theology and its Celtic, Calvinist and Romantic strands; Daniel Gabelman’s George MacDonald: Divine Carelessness and Fairytale Levity (2013) on levity and the childlike; Gisela Kreglinger’s Storied Revelations (2014) on the parables; Timothy Larsen’s George MacDonald in the Age of Miracles (2018) on incarnation, doubt and re-enchantment; and Kirstin Jeffrey Johnson’s St Andrews thesis (2011) and essays on the “relational and revelational nature” of the mythopoeic art. Rethinking George MacDonald: Contexts and Contemporaries (2013) and Informing the Inklings (2018) are the recent collections; the annotated editions of Phantastes (2008, 2017) and At the Back of the North Wind (2011) and Knoepflmacher’s Penguin Complete Fairy Tales (1999) are the working texts; Glenn Sadler’s An Expression of Character (1994) selects the letters; Shaberman’s Bibliographical Study (1990) is the bibliography; and the Johannesen reprints (Whitethorn, California) reproduce the original texts of the whole oeuvre.99
The institutions are the George MacDonald Society (founded 1981; its newsletter Orts and its journal North Wind: A Journal of George MacDonald Studies, 1982–, now hosted open-access by St Norbert College and edited by John Pennington), Barbara Amell’s quarterly Wingfold (Portland, Oregon, 1993–), which prints newly recovered lecture reports and letters, the Marion E. Wade Center at Wheaton College, of which MacDonald is one of the seven authors, and the Beinecke Library at Yale, whose George MacDonald Collection holds over 3,500 letters, the manuscripts and the Dodgson photographs; King’s College London and the National Library of Scotland hold further papers. The bicentenary of 2024 was marked by three conferences — “George MacDonald and the Prophetic Imagination” at the Wade Center (29–31 May), “Borderlands: George MacDonald Between Worlds” at St Andrews (8–10 November, with an excursion to Huntly) and “The Genius of George MacDonald” at Yale’s Institute of Sacred Music (13–15 December) — and by the bicentenary volume of North Wind; no essay collection from them had appeared by the summer of 2026. He has no entry in the Brill Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism (2005) and does not appear in the standard histories of Christian theosophy; the esotericism of his work has been studied by the readers of his fiction rather than by the historians of the currents it draws on.100
The doctrines MacDonald held he shared with Law, Novalis, Coleridge or Maurice; what was his own was the form he gave them. He took the Boehmean consuming fire, the Romantic imagination, the Platonic ascent and the Talmudic Lilith and made of them a kind of fiction — the “faerie romance for men and women” — in which the death of the self, the opening of the clenched hand, the passage through the north wind and the climbing of the stair could be undergone by a reader rather than explained to him; he stated the theory of that fiction, in the two essays on the imagination, more clearly than any English writer before or since; and he handed the whole to Lewis, who handed it to a readership of millions. The mythopoeic fantasy of the twentieth century, with its ancient wise women, its dying-into-life, its two worlds joined by a mirror or a wardrobe, and its refusal of allegory, is largely his invention, and it carries his theology whether or not its readers know it.
Bibliography#
Primary#
Works published in MacDonald’s lifetime, in order of publication
MacDonald, George. Twelve of the Spiritual Songs of Novalis. Privately printed [Arundel], 1851.
——. Within and Without: A Dramatic Poem. London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1855.
——. Poems. London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, & Roberts, 1857. Reissued as A Hidden Life and Other Poems. London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, & Green, 1864.
——. Phantastes: A Faerie Romance for Men and Women. London: Smith, Elder, 1858. New edition, with thirty-three illustrations by Arthur Hughes, edited by Greville MacDonald. London: Arthur C. Fifield, 1905.
——. David Elginbrod. 3 vols. London: Hurst & Blackett, 1863.
——. Adela Cathcart. 3 vols. London: Hurst & Blackett, 1864.
——. The Portent: A Story of the Inner Vision of the Highlanders, Commonly Called the Second Sight. London: Smith, Elder, 1864. (Serialised in the Cornhill Magazine, May–July 1860.)
——. Alec Forbes of Howglen. 3 vols. London: Hurst & Blackett, 1865.
——. Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood. 3 vols. London: Hurst & Blackett, 1867 [1866].
——. Dealings with the Fairies. Illustrated by Arthur Hughes. London: Alexander Strahan, 1867.
——. Unspoken Sermons. London: Alexander Strahan, 1867.
——. The Disciple and Other Poems. London: Strahan, 1867 [some copies 1868].
——. Guild Court: A London Story. 3 vols. London: Hurst & Blackett, 1868 [1867].
——. Robert Falconer. 3 vols. London: Hurst & Blackett, 1868.
——. The Seaboard Parish. 3 vols. London: Tinsley Brothers, 1868.
——. England’s Antiphon. London: Macmillan, 1868.
——. The Miracles of Our Lord. London: Strahan, 1870.
——. At the Back of the North Wind. Illustrated by Arthur Hughes. London: Strahan, 1871 [1870].
——. Ranald Bannerman’s Boyhood. Illustrated by Arthur Hughes. London: Strahan, 1871.
——. Works of Fancy and Imagination. 10 vols. London: Strahan, 1871.
——. The Princess and the Goblin. Illustrated by Arthur Hughes. London: Strahan, 1872 [1871].
——. Wilfrid Cumbermede: An Autobiographical Story. 3 vols. London: Hurst & Blackett, 1872 [1871].
——. The Vicar’s Daughter. 3 vols. London: Tinsley Brothers, 1872.
——. Gutta-Percha Willie: The Working Genius. Illustrated by Arthur Hughes. London: Henry S. King, 1873.
——. Malcolm. 3 vols. London: Henry S. King, 1875 [1874].
——. The Wise Woman: A Parable. London: Strahan, 1875. American edition as A Double Story. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1876. Reissued as The Lost Princess; or, The Wise Woman. London: Wells Gardner, Darton, 1895.
——. St George and St Michael. 3 vols. London: Henry S. King, 1876 [1875].
——. Thomas Wingfold, Curate. 3 vols. London: Hurst & Blackett, 1876.
——. Exotics: A Translation of the Spiritual Songs of Novalis, the Hymn-book of Luther, and other Poems from the German and Italian. London: Strahan, 1876.
——. The Marquis of Lossie. 3 vols. London: Hurst & Blackett, 1877.
——. Sir Gibbie. 3 vols. London: Hurst & Blackett, 1879.
——. Paul Faber, Surgeon. 3 vols. London: Hurst & Blackett, 1879.
——. A Book of Strife in the Form of the Diary of an Old Soul. Privately printed, 1880.
——. Mary Marston. 3 vols. London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1881.
——. Castle Warlock: A Homely Romance. 3 vols. London: Sampson Low, 1882. American edition as Warlock o’ Glenwarlock. Boston: Lothrop, 1881.
——. Weighed and Wanting. 3 vols. London: Sampson Low, 1882.
——. Orts. London: Sampson Low, 1882.
——. The Gifts of the Child Christ, and Other Tales. 2 vols. London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1882. Reissued as Stephen Archer and Other Tales. London: Sampson Low, 1883.
——. The Princess and Curdie. Illustrated by James Allen. London: Chatto & Windus, 1883.
——. Donal Grant. 3 vols. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, 1883.
——, John Hill MacDonald and Greville Matheson. A Threefold Cord: Poems by Three Friends. Privately printed, 1883.
——. The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke: A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623. London: Longmans, Green, 1885.
——. Unspoken Sermons, Second Series. London: Longmans, Green, 1885.
——. Preface to Letters from Hell, given in English by L. W. J. S. London: Richard Bentley & Son, 1884.
——. What’s Mine’s Mine. 3 vols. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, 1886.
——. Home Again: A Tale. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, 1887.
——. The Elect Lady. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, 1888.
——. Unspoken Sermons, Third Series. London: Longmans, Green, 1889.
——. A Rough Shaking. London: Blackie, 1891 [1890].
——. There and Back. 3 vols. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1891.
——. The Flight of the Shadow. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1891.
——. The Hope of the Gospel. London: Ward, Lock, Bowden, 1892.
——. Heather and Snow. 2 vols. London: Chatto & Windus, 1893.
——. The Poetical Works of George MacDonald. 2 vols. London: Chatto & Windus, 1893.
——. Scotch Songs and Ballads. Aberdeen: John Rae Smith, 1893.
——. A Dish of Orts: Chiefly Papers on the Imagination, and on Shakspere. Enlarged edition. London: Sampson Low, Marston, 1893.
——. The Light Princess and Other Fairy Tales. With the preface “The Fantastic Imagination”. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1893.
——. Lilith: A Romance. London: Chatto & Windus, 1895.
——. Salted with Fire. London: Hurst & Blackett, 1897.
——. Rampolli: Growths from a Long-Planted Root; being Translations, new and old, chiefly from the German; along with A Year’s Diary of an Old Soul. London: Longmans, Green, 1897.
——. Far Above Rubies. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1898.
Posthumous editions and collections
MacDonald, George. George MacDonald: An Anthology. Edited, with a preface, by C. S. Lewis. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1946; New York: Macmillan, 1947.
——. The Visionary Novels of George MacDonald: Lilith, Phantastes. Edited by Anne Fremantle, with an introduction by W. H. Auden. New York: Noonday Press, 1954.
——. The Golden Key. Illustrated by Maurice Sendak, with an afterword by W. H. Auden. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1967.
——. Creation in Christ: Unspoken Sermons. Edited by Rolland Hein. Wheaton, IL: Harold Shaw, 1976.
——. An Expression of Character: The Letters of George MacDonald. Edited by Glenn Edward Sadler. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994.
——. George MacDonald in the Pulpit: The “Spoken” Sermons of George MacDonald. Compiled by J. Joseph Flynn and David Edwards. Whitethorn, CA: Johannesen, 1996.
——. Lilith: A Variorum Edition. Edited by Rolland Hein. Whitethorn, CA: Johannesen, 1997.
——. The Complete Fairy Tales. Edited by U. C. Knoepflmacher. New York: Penguin, 1999.
——. Phantastes: The Annotated 150th Anniversary Edition. Edited by Nick Page. Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2008.
——. At the Back of the North Wind. Edited by Roderick McGillis and John Pennington. Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2011.
——. The Gospel in George MacDonald: Selections from His Novels, Fairy Tales, and Spiritual Writings. Edited by Marianne Wright. Walden, NY: Plough, 2016.
——. Phantastes: Annotated Edition. Edited by John Pennington and Roderick McGillis. Hamden, CT: Winged Lion Press, 2017.
The novels and theological works are reprinted in facsimile from the original editions in the Sunrise Centenary Editions of Johannesen (Whitethorn, California, 1990–), and in modernised and abridged form in Michael Phillips’s Bethany House series (Minneapolis, 1982–) and Cullen Collection (2016–).
Secondary#
Amell, Barbara (ed.). Wingfold. Quarterly. Portland, OR, 1993–.
Auden, W. H. “George MacDonald”. Introduction to The Visionary Novels of George MacDonald (1954); reprinted in Forewords and Afterwords. New York: Random House, 1973.
Burd, Van Akin. Ruskin, Lady Mount-Temple and the Spiritualists: An Episode in Broadlands History. London: Brentham Press, 1982.
Chesterton, G. K. Introduction to Greville MacDonald, George MacDonald and His Wife (1924).
——. Autobiography. London: Hutchinson, 1936.
Clute, John, and John Grant (eds). The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. London: Orbit, 1997. S.v. “MacDonald, George”.
Dearborn, Kerry. Baptized Imagination: The Theology of George MacDonald. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006.
Docherty, John. The Literary Products of the Lewis Carroll–George MacDonald Friendship. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1995.
Gaarden, Bonnie. The Christian Goddess: Archetype and Theology in the Fantasies of George MacDonald. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2011.
——. Review of Dearborn, Baptized Imagination. North Wind 26 (2007), 135–37.
Gabelman, Daniel. George MacDonald: Divine Carelessness and Fairytale Levity. Waco: Baylor University Press, 2013.
Hein, Rolland. The Harmony Within: The Spiritual Vision of George MacDonald. Grand Rapids: Christian University Press, 1982; new edition, Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2014.
——. George MacDonald: Victorian Mythmaker. Nashville: Star Song, 1993.
Johnson, Joseph. George MacDonald: A Biographical and Critical Appreciation. London: Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, 1906.
Johnson, Kirstin Jeffrey. “‘The Curdie Books, Please’: C. S. Lewis’ Co-Creative Reading in That Hideous Strength”. Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal 5:1 (2012), 43–66.
——. “Curdie’s Intertextual Dialogue: Engaging Maurice, Arnold, and Isaiah”. In Roderick McGillis (ed.), George MacDonald: Literary Heritage and Heirs. Wayne, PA: Zossima Press, 2008, 153–82.
——. “Rooted in all its Story, More is Meant than Meets the Ear: A Study of the Relational and Revelational Nature of George MacDonald’s Mythopoeic Art”. PhD thesis, University of St Andrews, 2011; abridged in North Wind 30 (2011), 85–134.
Kegler, Adelheid. “Silent House: MacDonald, Brontë and Silence Within the Soul”. In Kath Filmer (ed.), The Victorian Fantasists. London: Macmillan, 1991, 104–32.
——. “Wilfrid Cumbermede: A Novel in the Context of European Symbolism”. North Wind 21 (2002), 71–84.
——. “Below in the Depths: MacDonald’s Symbolic Landscape”. North Wind 24 (2005), 29–40.
Kreglinger, Gisela H. Storied Revelations: Parables, Imagination and George MacDonald’s Christian Fiction. Cambridge: Lutterworth, 2014.
Larsen, Timothy. George MacDonald in the Age of Miracles: Incarnation, Doubt, and Reenchantment. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2018.
Lewis, C. S. Preface to George MacDonald: An Anthology. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1946.
——. Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1955.
Lindskoog, Kathryn. “Mark Twain and George MacDonald: The Salty and the Sweet”. Mark Twain Journal (August 1994).
MacDonald, Greville. George MacDonald and His Wife. With an introduction by G. K. Chesterton. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1924.
MacDonald, Ronald. “George MacDonald: A Personal Note”. In From a Northern Window: Papers, Critical, Historical, and Imaginative. London, 1911.
MacLachlan, Christopher, John Patrick Pazdziora and Ginger Stelle (eds). Rethinking George MacDonald: Contexts and Contemporaries. Glasgow: Scottish Literature International, 2013.
Manlove, Colin. Modern Fantasy: Five Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975.
——. Christian Fantasy: From 1200 to the Present. London: Macmillan, 1992.
——. “‘Not to Hide but to Show’: ‘The Golden Key’”. North Wind 22 (2003), 33–41.
——. Scotland’s Forgotten Treasure: The Visionary Romances of George MacDonald. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 2016.
——. George MacDonald’s Children’s Fantasies and the Divine Imagination. Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2019.
Maslen, Rob. “George MacDonald, Phantastes (1858)”. The City of Lost Books (University of Glasgow), 2015.
McGillis, Roderick (ed.). For the Childlike: George MacDonald’s Fantasies for Children. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1992.
—— (ed.). George MacDonald: Literary Heritage and Heirs. Wayne, PA: Zossima Press, 2008.
McInnis, Jeff. Shadows and Chivalry: C. S. Lewis and George MacDonald on Suffering, Evil and Goodness. Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2007.
Nelson, Dale J. “MacDonald and Jacob Boehme”. North Wind 8 (1989), 24–36.
Partridge, Michael, and Kirstin Jeffrey Johnson (eds). Informing the Inklings: George MacDonald and the Victorian Roots of Modern Fantasy. Hamden, CT: Winged Lion Press, 2018.
Pennington, John, and Roderick McGillis (eds). Behind the Back of the North Wind: Critical Essays on a Classic. Hamden, CT: Winged Lion Press, 2011.
Phillips, Michael. George MacDonald: Scotland’s Beloved Storyteller. Minneapolis: Bethany House, 1987.
Prickett, Stephen. Romanticism and Religion: The Tradition of Coleridge and Wordsworth in the Victorian Church. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976.
——. Victorian Fantasy. Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1979; 2nd edn, Waco: Baylor University Press, 2005.
Raeper, William. George MacDonald. Tring: Lion, 1987.
—— (ed.). The Gold Thread: Essays on George MacDonald. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990.
Reis, Richard H. George MacDonald. New York: Twayne, 1972.
Robb, David S. George MacDonald. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1987.
Roukema, Aren. “The Shadow of Anodos: Alchemical Symbolism in Phantastes”. North Wind 31 (2012), 48–63.
Sadler, Glenn Edward. “Defining Death as ‘More Life’: Unpublished Letters by George MacDonald”. North Wind 3 (1984), 4–18.
Shaberman, Raphael B. “George MacDonald and Lewis Carroll”. North Wind 1 (1982), 10–30.
——. George MacDonald: A Bibliographical Study. Winchester: St Paul’s Bibliographies; Detroit: Omnigraphics, 1990.
Soto, Fernando. “Chthonic Aspects of MacDonald’s Phantastes: From the Rising of the Goddess to the Anodos of Anodos”. North Wind 19 (2000), 19–49.
Tolkien, J. R. R. “On Fairy-Stories”. In Essays Presented to Charles Williams. London: Oxford University Press, 1947.
——. The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien. Edited by Humphrey Carpenter with Christopher Tolkien. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981. (No. 262, 7 September 1964.)
Wolff, Robert Lee. The Golden Key: A Study of the Fiction of George MacDonald. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961.
Guided Inquiry
Questions for Socrates
12 questions grounded in this entry open directly in Socrates with George MacDonald as the reading context.
Fatherhood, Will, and Restoration
- If “the childlike is the divine,” how does MacDonald’s idea of authority differ from the governing and judging God he rejected?→
- If “only as we do, can we know,” what genuine work can doctrine or argument still perform?→
- Is the true self found through self-denial a recovery of individuality or a surrender of it?→
- If punishment is remedial and justice and mercy are one, what distinguishes restoration from coercion?→
Imagination, Nature, and Symbol
- What does it mean for a fairy tale to wake meaning rather than convey one?→
- If nature is God’s thought made visible, what freedom remains to the human imagination?→
- How does Phantastes turn the death of the heroic self into a narrative experience rather than a doctrine?→
- In Lilith, why must the clenched hand open by an act of will even when divine power can heal it?→
Boundaries and Afterlives
- Why does MacDonald reject mesmerism and spiritualism as materialism while affirming dreams, second sight, and inner vision?→
- Do MacDonald’s feminine wisdom figures amount to a theology, or do they remain narrative symbols?→
- Is “Christian universalist in hope and Romantic Platonist of the will” more clarifying than the labels MacDonald refused?→
- If modern fantasy carries MacDonald’s theology without naming it, does his influence reside more in literary form or in doctrine?→
Source ApparatusNotes100 notes
- ↩
The overview draws on the sections that follow. For the phrase “my master” see C. S. Lewis, preface to George MacDonald: An Anthology (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1946), and the section on Reception below; for Boehme, Law and Blake at Bordighera, Greville MacDonald, George MacDonald and His Wife (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1924), 554, 557 (hereafter cited as Greville, with page); for “only as we do, can we know”, Unspoken Sermons, Second Series (London: Longmans, Green, 1885), “The Truth in Jesus”; for “only more life”, “The Golden Key” in Dealings with the Fairies (London: Alexander Strahan, 1867). MacDonald has no entry in the Brill Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism (ed. Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Leiden, 2005), and the scholarship on his esoteric sources is almost entirely internal to MacDonald studies (see the notes to Thought below).
- ↩
Greville, 19 (birth), 25–34 (the family, the firm, the amputation, the move to Upper Pirriesmill in 1826), 41–42 (the Culloden piper “William McDonald Piper Portsoy Banff” in the “List of Persons concerned in the Rebellion”; Glencoe “cannot be authenticated”), 46 (the MacKays), 52–55 (the mother’s death, the second marriage, the brothers and half-sisters), 57 (Gaelic at the Gordon Arms), 318 (letter to the Spectator, 11 July 1867). The Historic Environment Scotland listing for 45 Duke Street records that “At no. 41 now much altered Geo. Macdonald was born 10th Dec. 1824”; the 1905 Manchester Guardian obituary’s “Bogie Street” and the “Upper Pirriesmill” of some modern reference works are both wrong for the birthplace. The dedicatory sonnets “To My Father” are printed in Poems (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, & Roberts, 1857), and reprinted before “A Hidden Life” in The Poetical Works of George MacDonald, 2 vols (London: Chatto & Windus, 1893), i.
- ↩
Greville, 26–27 (the grandmother and the Missionar Kirk), 67 (Aulton Grammar School and the Fullarton bursary), 69 (the chemistry letter of 28 October 1841), 72–73 (the library of 1842, Troup’s note, and the footnote on Thurso and Dunbeath), with the quotation from The Portent which Greville reads as autobiographical; Dictionary of National Biography, Second Supplement (1912), s.v. (M.A. March 1845). “One of my earliest recollections …”: Unspoken Sermons, Second Series, “The Truth in Jesus”. The schoolmaster, “the original of the barbarous Murdoch Malison in Alec Forbes”: Greville, 60. For the Missionar Kirk and the grandmother’s house as the model for Mrs Falconer’s, Greville, 27, 30.
- ↩
Greville, 93–97 (Louisa Powell and the Clapton cousins), 110 (end of the tutorship), 118 (Highbury and Cork), 135 (Arundel, August 1850), 141–46 (the ordination proposed for the end of November 1850 and postponed by the haemorrhage of early November), 151 (the wedding), 155 (letter of 15 April 1851), 159 (the Novalis pamphlet, printed at Arundel “for private circulation as a Christmas gift to his friends”); DNB (1912) on Highbury (“finding the ways of Highbury College uncongenial, he did not finish his course there”). The ordination: Greville, 157 (“In June 1851 Mr. Godwin came down for the ordination”); the day is not given, and MacDonald himself “had no strong feeling as to the necessity of ordination” (Greville, 142).
- ↩
Greville, 177–85, the chapter “The Heresy Hunt”: the deacons’ visit “at the end of June 1852” and the two charges, 178–79; the footnote on the chapel books (“the stipend paid him for his final half-year was £56 16s.”), 179; the animals as gossip, 177–78; the church meeting of 5 July 1852 and the resolution, 179–80; the letters of 29 April and 20 May 1853, 184–85; “He resigned in May 1853”, 183. The statement in the DNB (1912) that he resigned “at the close of 1853”, and the statements in many later accounts that his salary was “halved” (Wikipedia) or cut by two-thirds, and that the charges included the salvation of animals, are all corrected by Greville’s documents. C. S. Lewis summarised the charges accurately in his preface of 1946: “the charges being that he had expressed belief in a future state of probation for heathens and that he was tainted with German theology.” Joseph Johnson, George MacDonald: A Biographical and Critical Appreciation (London: Pitman, 1906), puts it that “after a ministry of not quite three years, he was quietly told that his preaching was not in harmony with the orthodox beliefs of the members of the church”; there was no ecclesiastical trial, and “heresy charge” is used here in Greville’s loose sense.
- ↩
Greville, 191 (Scott, “the man he revered beyond any met since leaving home”), 197 (letter to his father on sects), 212 (Renshaw Street; the beard grown on medical advice), 241 (Huntly, July 1855: “his unorthodoxy was so notorious”), 259 (illness of January 1856), 266–67 (Algiers), 277–78 (return April 1857; Lady Byron, first met June 1857, “the most extraordinary person … a great, pure, unselfish soul”; Poems), 301–02 (Hunt, Dodgson, Hughes, Munro; the mesmerist: “It was this man that suggested to my father the character of von Funkelstein in David Elginbrod”), 492 (Kingswear, 1856, “at death’s door”); DNB (1912) on Tennyson and Lady Byron; for Scott’s deposition of 27 May 1831, DNB, s.v. “Scott, Alexander John”; “The Consuming Fire” in Unspoken Sermons (London: Alexander Strahan, 1867). For Hunt and Dodgson, R. B. Shaberman, “George MacDonald and Lewis Carroll”, North Wind 1 (1982), 10–30. The Hastings address and the writing of Phantastes there are recorded by the George MacDonald Society. Henry Septimus Sutton (1825–1901), Manchester poet and journalist, became a Swedenborgian lay preacher in 1857 (DNB).
- ↩
Greville, 302–04 (lectures of 1859; Bedford College), 311 (Queen Square), 313 (the college stipend “varied between fifty and thirty guineas”; Lady Byron’s legacy of £300 and the lost sovereign), 322 (David Elginbrod: “They gave its author £90 for it … Never again had he difficulty in placing a book”), 342 (Alice at Tudor Lodge), 353–54 (Strahan; the Edinburgh chair), 379 (The Retreat, autumn 1867; Morris “the following year”, 474 n.); the King’s College lectureship is dated 1866–68 in the King’s College London archives (K/PP82), but Greville (366) thought it began in 1865, as do the Wade Center and Christian History Institute timelines; the LL.D. of 1868: Greville, 88 and 385 (the official words quoted). Dodgson’s diary for 9 May 1863 records “Heard from Mrs. MacDonald about ‘Alice’s Adventures Under Ground,’ which I had lent them to read” (Shaberman, as in n. 6).
- ↩
Greville, 353 (Maurice godfather), 380 (the entertainments at The Retreat; Tennyson’s visit, 24 March 1875), 397–98 (Maurice, King’s College, the Vere Street communion, the suppressed stanza; “following Professor Maurice, my father always claimed that the words life eternal in the New Testament bore no relation to time”), 300 (the Kingsleys “ranked among their intimates”; Ruskin introduced by Mrs La Touche), 351 and 417 (Rose La Touche, August 1872), 412 (letter of 26 July 1871 on the editing). The date of the Vere Street communion: Louisa wrote in January 1873 that an American friend “saw us first at St. Peter’s, Vere Street, 6 or 7 years ago and joined with us there in the communion service” (Greville, 439); the Wade timeline gives 1866, Stephen Prickett 1865. No source states that MacDonald was ever ordained in the Church of England; the DNB (1912) and the 1905 obituaries say “lay member”. For Good Words for the Young, see the Victorian Web’s account of the magazine (MacDonald “took over this role from Norman Macleod in October 1869”).
- ↩
Greville, 414 (the Redpath contract), 418–26 (the voyage, Fields, Stowe, Emerson, Longfellow, Brooks; the first lecture “on October 10th in the Union Hall at Cambridgeport … his first anywhere on Robert Burns”; the Lyceum audience; Redpath’s remark; the visit to Whittier at Amesbury on 30 October), 437 (the £400 sent home), 441–56 (the itinerary), 443 (Elmira, 27 January 1873, “entertained by Mrs. Samuel L. Clemens”), 459–60 (the Fifth Avenue offer; the farewell of 19 May 1873 and Gilder’s letter), 465 (Twain at The Retreat). The Twain correspondence is set out by Kathryn Lindskoog, “Mark Twain and George MacDonald: The Salty and the Sweet”, Mark Twain Journal (August 1994): MacDonald’s proposal of 16 February 1883, Twain’s refusal of 9 March, and the letter to Howells of 1899. The Whitman friendship, given in some reference works on the authority of Hein (1993), has no support in Greville’s narrative of the tour.
- ↩
Greville, 467–74 (Tangley, Boscombe, the dismantling of The Retreat), 472–73 (Cowper-Temple’s account of their first meeting in 1867; the Broadlands letter of 21 December 1875, where Greville identifies “Mrs. A.” as “a society spiritualistic medium”; the conference of 1877), 479 (the pension, letter of 2 November 1877; Princess Alice), 470 and 501–02 (The Pilgrim’s Progress, first performed at Christchurch on 8 March 1877; “the Lord Chamberlain refused to license a religious play”), 483, 489–92, 503, 526 (the deaths of Mary, Maurice, Grace and Lilia), 485 (the poem of November 1878), 505–06 (the subscribers to Casa Coraggio and the mortgage; no total is given, and the “£1,500” of some accounts has not been traced to any source). For the Broadlands Conferences of 1874–88 and MacDonald’s presence at the first, see the University of Southampton Special Collections’ account of the Mount-Temple papers; for Ruskin and the mediums at Broadlands, Van Akin Burd, Ruskin, Lady Mount-Temple and the Spiritualists: An Episode in Broadlands History (London: Brentham Press, 1982). The move into Casa Coraggio at Christmas 1880 is given by the Wade Center’s account of the family in Italy; the DNB’s “from 1881” refers to the first full year.
- ↩
Greville, 525 (the last lecture of 6 November 1891: “forty-eight lectures in fifty-eight days … he never spoke again in public for any fee”), 546 (Salted with Fire “his last book of all” — Far Above Rubies appeared only in The Sketch and in an American edition), 554 (Blake’s Grave), 557 (Spanish, Dutch, Boehme, Goodchild), 558 (“he realized that his brain sometimes would not respond to his imagination”), 560 (St George’s Wood; “for five years he scarcely spoke one word”), 561 (golden wedding; Louisa’s death), 562 (death, cremation, burial). The “stroke” of 1898 is asserted in the Wade Center timeline without a source and is not in Greville. For Ashtead (“Sagamore”, the arrival “about a year ago” recorded in the parish magazine of October 1905, the funeral of 21 September), the Ashtead local history record and the Manchester Guardian obituary of 20 September 1905. On Goodchild (1851–1914), see the Wikipedia and Sue Young histories of the Glastonbury “cup”; Greville’s account of the trial names him only as “Dr. John A. Goodchild”.
- ↩
“Our Lord had no design …”: Unspoken Sermons [First Series] (London: Alexander Strahan, 1867), “It Shall Not Be Forgiven”. The three series are cited hereafter as US I, II and III, by sermon title, since the modern editions are unpaginated and the first editions were not available for this entry: US II = Unspoken Sermons, Second Series (London: Longmans, Green, 1885); US III = Unspoken Sermons, Third Series (London: Longmans, Green, 1889). The Hope of the Gospel (London: Ward, Lock, Bowden, 1892) is cited as HG by sermon title; “The Imagination: Its Functions and Its Culture” (1867) and “The Fantastic Imagination” (1893) are cited from A Dish of Orts (London: Sampson Low, Marston, 1893). On MacDonald’s refusal of the label “Universalist”, Greville, 551–52, and Barbara Amell, “‘The believing faculty’: George MacDonald on Universal Salvation”, Wingfold and worksofmacdonald.com (2021).
- ↩
The quotations in the outline are all given with their sources in the sections that follow. “Easy to please and hard to satisfy” is Chesterton’s summary of MacDonald in his introduction to Greville, 12 (“Carlyle could never have said anything so subtle and simple as MacDonald’s saying that God is easy to please and hard to satisfy”); MacDonald’s own words, in “The Imagination”, are “easy to please, but ill to satisfy”.
- ↩
US I, “The Child in the Midst” (all quotations); “For my part, I do not write for children …”: “The Fantastic Imagination”, A Dish of Orts. “From all copies of Jonathan Edwards’s portrait of God … I turn with loathing”: US III, “Justice”; the governor-God as “a miserable, puritanical martinet of a God, caring not for righteousness, but for his rights”: ibid.
- ↩
US II, “Abba, Father!”; US III, “The Creation in Christ”; US II, “Life”. The reading “that which was made in him was life” (John 1:3–4, with the stop after oude hen) is the punctuation of the earliest Greek fathers, adopted by several modern critical editions, which MacDonald follows.
- ↩
US I, “The Higher Faith”; HG, “Jesus and his Fellow Townsmen”; US I, “It Shall Not Be Forgiven”; US III, “Justice”.
- ↩
US II, “Life” (“the will is the deepest …”); US III, “Kingship” (the “one principle of hell” paragraph, checked against the text of the sermon; it is often misattributed to “The Creation in Christ”); Lilith: A Romance (London: Chatto & Windus, 1895), ch. XXXIX, “That Night” (“There is no slave …”).
- ↩
US II, “The Cause of Spiritual Stupidity”, “The Word of Jesus on Prayer”, “The Truth in Jesus”; US I, “The Eloi” (“bethink thee of something …”); A Book of Strife in the Form of the Diary of an Old Soul (privately printed, 1880), May 16 and February 9; US III, “The Truth” (“The man is a true man …”). “Do the truth ye know …” could not be found in the sermons, the Diary or The Hope of the Gospel; it is probably a paraphrase, or a line of dialogue from one of the novels, and should not be cited to Unspoken Sermons.
- ↩
US II, “Self-Denial”; US I, “The Consuming Fire”; Phantastes: A Faerie Romance for Men and Women (London: Smith, Elder, 1858), chs VIII–IX (the closet and the shadow) and XXII (“I learned that it is better …”; “Self will come to life …”); Lilith, ch. III (“No one can say …”); US II, “The Last Farthing”.
- ↩
US I, “The New Name” (all quotations, including the definition of mysticism and the reference to Swedenborg); US III, “The Truth”. The affinity of “the new name” with the Boehmean signatura and with Swedenborg’s doctrine of the individual as a distinct form of the divine is evident, but MacDonald himself argues in purely biblical terms; for the Swedenborgian reading of his symbolism see Adelheid Kegler, “Below in the Depths: MacDonald’s Symbolic Landscape”, North Wind 24 (2005), 29–40.
- ↩
US I, “The Consuming Fire” (all quotations). C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1940), epigraph: “The Son of God suffered unto the death, not that men might not suffer, but that their sufferings might be like His.”
- ↩
US III, “Justice” (all quotations except the last three); “Believe in Moloch …”: US III, “Righteousness”; “Jesus did not die to save us from punishment …” and “No soul is saved …”: “Justice”; “all and altogether the invention of men”: US II, “The Truth in Jesus”, which also records that the sermon was occasioned by a passage of Herbert Spencer condemning “the effecting a reconciliation by sacrificing a son who was perfectly innocent” — “I entirely agree with it … Such paganism I scorn as heartily in the name of Christ, as I scorn it in the name of righteousness.”
- ↩
US II, “The Last Farthing”; US I, “Love Thine Enemy”; US II, “The Fear of God”; Lilith, ch. XXX, “Adam Explains”. “All punishment is kindness, and the best of which the man at the time is capable” and “Theologians have done more to hide the gospel of Christ than any of its adversaries. It was not for our understandings, but our will, that Christ came”: “The Last Farthing”.
- ↩
Greville, 551–52 (“The book was written, I do think, in view of the increasingly easy tendencies in universalists …”); the lecture reports of 1887 and 1890 are printed by Barbara Amell in Wingfold (Winter 2012 and Winter 2015) and summarised in her article of 2021 (as in n. 12); they were not checked against Wingfold for this entry. HG, “The Hope of the Universe” (all quotations on the animals and vivisection); Lilith, ch. XXIX, “The Persian Cat” (“Good and not Evil is the Universe …”), and chs XXXIX–XL for Lilith’s hand. On the shape of MacDonald’s universalism, Kerry Dearborn, Baptized Imagination: The Theology of George MacDonald (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), and Rolland Hein, The Harmony Within: The Spiritual Vision of George MacDonald (Grand Rapids: Christian University Press, 1982). C. S. Lewis’s MacDonald in The Great Divorce (1945), who declines to say whether all will be saved, reproduces the reticence exactly.
- ↩
US II, “Life”; US I, “The God of the Living” (the resurrection body); US II, “The Fear of God” (“God is being; death is nowhere!”); US III, “The Inheritance” (“continuous touch with God”; “I am sorry; forgive me”); “The Golden Key”, in Dealings with the Fairies (London: Alexander Strahan, 1867); Phantastes, chs XXIV–XXV; Lilith, ch. XXXI (“you will be dead, so long as you refuse to die”) and XLVII; Glenn Edward Sadler, “Defining Death as ‘More Life’: Unpublished Letters by George MacDonald”, North Wind 3 (1984), 4–18, at 11–17 (letters to the Mount-Temples of 17 February 1878, 9 April 1879 and 9 December 1888; Sadler’s summary at 16–17); The Flight of the Shadow (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1891), ch. XXXVI.
- ↩
The Portent: A Story of the Inner Vision of the Highlanders, Commonly Called the Second Sight (London: Smith, Elder, 1864), dedication to Duncan McColl, R.N., of Huntly, dated Kensington, May 1864; Greville, 318 (his father “would reluctantly admit he had himself no trace” of the gift) and 481; What’s Mine’s Mine (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, 1886), i, ch. XI; Wilfrid Cumbermede (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1872), ch. LVII; US II, “Man’s Difficulty concerning Prayer” (“Death is not an impervious wall …”); Donal Grant (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, 1883), chs XXII and XLI.
- ↩
“The Imagination: Its Functions and Its Culture”, first published in the British Quarterly Review (July 1867), reprinted in Orts (London: Sampson Low, 1882) and A Dish of Orts (1893); all quotations from the 1893 text.
- ↩
“The Fantastic Imagination”, A Dish of Orts (1893); the preface to the volume, dated Edenbridge, Kent, 5 August 1893, records that the paper “forms the preface to an American edition of my so-called Fairy Tales” — The Light Princess and Other Fairy Tales (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1893). “Novalis says, ‘The imagination is the stuff of the intellect’”: “The Imagination”. For the Coleridgean lineage, Stephen Prickett, Romanticism and Religion: The Tradition of Coleridge and Wordsworth in the Victorian Church (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), and Victorian Fantasy (Hassocks: Harvester, 1979; 2nd edn, Waco: Baylor University Press, 2005); Dearborn (as in n. 24), on Novalis’s view that “ethics and obedience” are “necessary for knowledge of God”.
- ↩
“Wordsworth’s Poetry” (“Delivered extempore at Manchester”), A Dish of Orts; US III, “The Truth”; “The Imagination”, A Dish of Orts; England’s Antiphon (London: Macmillan, 1868), ch. XVI, “Henry More and Richard Baxter” (the passage on the mystical school and Swedenborg), and ch. XVIII, “A Mount of Vision — Henry Vaughan” (“His twin-brother Thomas developed his mysticism downwards in the direction of the material sciences — a true effort still, but one in which the danger of ceasing to be true increases”); Malcolm (London: Henry S. King, 1875), ch. VII; Greville, 216–17. The sentence “the world is the great book of God”, sometimes attributed to MacDonald, is not his.
- ↩
Kegler, “Silent House: MacDonald, Brontë and Silence Within the Soul”, in Kath Filmer (ed.), The Victorian Fantasists (London: Macmillan, 1991), 104–32; Hein, The Harmony Within (as in n. 24); Dearborn, Baptized Imagination, as summarised by Bonnie Gaarden in her review, North Wind 26 (2007), 135–37; The Miracles of Our Lord (London: Strahan, 1870), chs I (“the works of the Father done in little”; “an epitome of God’s processes in nature”) and XII, “The Transfiguration”; US III, “The Mirrors of the Lord”.
- ↩
Greville, 557 (Law’s quarto edition and the Dutch Forty Questions; the Dutch he taught himself; “not deeply versed”; “however deep a man may be in Hell, he can never be outside God”); David Elginbrod (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1863), Book I, ch. IX (epigraph from “Jacob Behmen’s Aurora — Law’s Translation”) and ch. XIII (the Aurora of 1612 inscribed “Martin Elginbrodde”); Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1867), ch. IX; Lilith, note to ch. XLII (“take with both hands”: “William Law”). Dale J. Nelson, “MacDonald and Jacob Boehme”, North Wind 8 (1989), 24–36, at 24–25, 27–28, 33, lists eight parallels (God dwelling in and proceeding through nature; nature disclosing God; the visible world as an extension of embodiment; fallen man becoming bestial; regeneration in Christ; wrath as experienced only by those who reject God; salvation as homecoming; the demand for spiritual maturity in the reader) and gives the quotation on Law; England’s Antiphon (London: Macmillan, 1868), ch. XIX, on John Byrom (“Coming under the influence, probably through William Law, of the writings of Jacob Böhme, the marvellous shoemaker of Görlitz in Silesia … the mystical thinker will ever be found the reviver of religious poetry”). Aren Roukema, “The Shadow of Anodos: Alchemical Symbolism in Phantastes”, North Wind 31 (2012), 48–63, at 52 and 62. The lecture repertory is listed from the reports indexed in Wingfold (worksofmacdonald.com, “Lectures”).
- ↩
Greville, 159 (the Novalis pamphlet) and 554 (Blake and the Cemetery: “I have no reason for thinking that my father made any study of Blake’s prophetic books … But my father did unquestionably get help from Blake in his need to tell us the truth about the Grave”); Rampolli: Growths from a Long-Planted Root (London: Longmans, Green, 1897), “Preface to the Translations”, and Exotics (London: Strahan, 1876), preface (“twice the labour”); Phantastes, general epigraph (Novalis, in German: “Ein Märchen ist wie ein Traumbild ohne Zusammenhang … Die Welt des Märchens ist die, der Welt der Wahrheit durchaus entgegengesetzte, und eben darum ihr so durchaus ähnlich, wie das Chaos der vollendeten Schöpfung ähnlich ist”; the English rendering above is the present writer’s), and chapter epigraphs; Lilith, ch. XLVII; David Elginbrod, Book III, ch. XXIV; The Marquis of Lossie (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1877), ch. XV; “The Golden Key”, footnote (“I think I must be indebted to Novalis for these geometrical figures”); At the Back of the North Wind (London: Strahan, 1871), ch. X (Dante, “Durante — that was the name of the Italian, and it means Lasting”, and Hogg’s “Kilmeny”); Adela Cathcart (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1864), i, ch. I. For the Spenserian title, Rob Maslen, “George MacDonald, Phantastes (1858)”, The City of Lost Books (University of Glasgow, 2015). The Swedenborg references in the novels are collected by Nelson (as in n. 31), 34 n. 9; Kegler, “Below in the Depths” (as in n. 20), 33–34 (Diamond and Sir David as the Maximus Homo; “pictorial expressions of Swedenborg’s philosophy and mysticism in the paintings of G. F. Watts, Rossetti, Millais and Burne-Jones”), and “Wilfrid Cumbermede: A Novel in the Context of European Symbolism”, North Wind 21 (2002), 71–84. The Powells: Greville, 97 (“profoundly religious and all … Nonconformist”). The statement in some accounts that MacDonald’s father-in-law was a Swedenborgian appears to derive from a confusion with the Sutton circle; nothing in Greville or in the letters supports it.
- ↩
On Erskine, Campbell, Scott and Maurice as MacDonald’s theological sources: Dearborn, Baptized Imagination (Gaarden’s review, North Wind 26 (2007), 135, lists “F. D. Maurice, Thomas Erskine, Alexander Scott, and John Campbell”); Gisela H. Kreglinger, Storied Revelations: Parables, Imagination and George MacDonald’s Christian Fiction (Cambridge: Lutterworth, 2014), ch. 1; Greville, 398 n. (“following Professor Maurice …”). Scott’s deposition by the Presbytery of Paisley on 27 May 1831, for refusing to assent that “none are redeemed by Christ but the elect only”: DNB, s.v. Maurice’s Theological Essays (Cambridge: Macmillan, 1853) and his dismissal from King’s College in 1853: Greville, 397.
- ↩
Greville, 302 (Zamoiski), 472 (the Broadlands letter of 21 December 1875), 485 (the poem of November 1878); David Elginbrod, Book II, chs XVII, XVIII, XXI (chapter titles), and Book III, chs XII (“possession indeed”) and XVIII (“I dare not exercise a power …”); R. B. Shaberman, “George MacDonald and Lewis Carroll”, North Wind 1 (1982), 10–30 (Zamoiski and Funkelstein); “The History of Photogen and Nycteris: A Day and Night Mährchen”, in The Gifts of the Child Christ and Other Tales (London: Sampson Low, 1882), ch. I; “The Shadows”, in Adela Cathcart (1864) and Dealings with the Fairies (1867); Donal Grant, ch. XLI; Wilfrid Cumbermede, ch. LXI; Lilith, ch. XXXVII. For the Cowper-Temples and the mediums, the University of Southampton Special Collections’ account of the Broadlands Conferences and Burd, Ruskin, Lady Mount-Temple and the Spiritualists (as in n. 10); Sadler, “Defining Death as ‘More Life’” (as in n. 25). No reference to Blavatsky or the Theosophical Society has been found in MacDonald’s published writings or in Greville’s biography; a search of Sadler’s edition of the letters (An Expression of Character: The Letters of George MacDonald, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994) for a direct statement on spiritualism was not possible for this entry.
- ↩
Phantastes, ch. XIX; “The Golden Key”; At the Back of the North Wind, chs IX and XXXVI; The Princess and the Goblin (London: Strahan, 1872), chs III and XI; The Princess and Curdie (London: Chatto & Windus, 1883), chs VII (“Shapes are only dresses …”), IX and XXXI; The Wise Woman: A Parable (London: Strahan, 1875), chs III, XIII; Lilith, chs XXIX (“the lady of the New Jerusalem”; Lilith’s history), XXXIX; “A Sketch of Individual Development” (1880), A Dish of Orts. Bonnie Gaarden, The Christian Goddess: Archetype and Theology in the Fantasies of George MacDonald (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2011); Scott McLaren’s review in Mythlore 30:3/4 (2012) accepts the scholarship while objecting to the claim that MacDonald “presented God as a woman”; Gaarden, review of Dearborn, North Wind 26 (2007), 137 (“Sophianic mysticism, nourished by Boehme and Swedenborg”); Nelson (as in n. 31), 33.
- ↩
“Obedience alone can convince …”: “A Sketch of Individual Development”, A Dish of Orts; G. K. Chesterton, Autobiography (London: Hutchinson, 1936), ch. VII, “The Crime of Orthodoxy”, 171–72, where the “optimistic theism” Chesterton had learned in youth is described as “substantially the same as that which I had learnt since childhood under the glamorous mysticism of George Macdonald … Its Universalism was a sort of optimistic Calvinism”; Chesterton’s introduction to Greville, 12–14; Hein, The Harmony Within; Kegler (as in n. 20 and n. 30); Gaarden (as in n. 35). For the reception among the Inklings, see the section on Reception below.
- ↩
The order of publication of the whole oeuvre is given, with the first-edition data, in the Bibliography below. The bibliographical standard is Raphael B. Shaberman, George MacDonald: A Bibliographical Study (Winchester: St Paul’s Bibliographies; Detroit: Omnigraphics, 1990), which was not available for this entry; first-edition data are taken, where marked, from the Jarndyce catalogue George MacDonald (2011), the Wade Center timeline, the DNB and the title-pages of the copies consulted.
- ↩
Greville, 159; DNB (1912) (“Twelve of the Spiritual Songs of Novalis. privately printed, 1851”); Rampolli (1897), Spiritual Songs V and XV and the translator’s note; Exotics (1876), preface. Greville’s connection of the pamphlet with the Arundel charge of “German theology”: Greville, 179.
- ↩
Within and Without: A Dramatic Poem (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1855); text and dedicatory sonnet as reprinted in Poetical Works (1893), i; DNB (1912) (“The book won the appreciation of Tennyson and the intense admiration of Lady Byron, who became at once a close friend”); Ethel Colburn Mayne, The Life and Letters of Anne Isabella, Lady Noel Byron (London: Constable, 1929), 391 (“It was through the reading of his narrative poem, ‘Within and Without’ … that their acquaintance began”). The content of Tennyson’s response is not recorded beyond the DNB’s sentence.
- ↩
Within and Without, Parts I–V, quoted from Poetical Works, i; DNB (1912) on Pauline. The tale of “The Singer” is in Part III.
- ↩
Poems (1857), consulted in its reissue A Hidden Life and Other Poems (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, & Green, 1864), which carries the same dedication dated 1857; the sonnets “To My Father” are reprinted in Poetical Works, i, before “A Hidden Life”; “Light” (“To A.J. Scott”); “Eighteen Sonnets, About Jesus”, nos. I, IV, XVII, XVIII (the 1893 text of XVII is quoted). The Disciple and Other Poems (London: Strahan, 1867), title poem, sections I–XXXII, quoted from Poetical Works, i; the section-titles of the volume from the catalogue of the State Library of New South Wales, whose copy is dated 1868. The precise assignment of individual poems to the 1857 and 1867 volumes could not be checked against first editions.
- ↩
Exotics (London: Strahan, 1876), title-page and prefatory note (consulted only in an OCR transcript; wording to be checked against a copy); A Threefold Cord: Poems by Three Friends (privately printed, 1883; the printer given as W. Hughes in some bibliographies), dedication as reprinted in Poetical Works, ii; The Poetical Works of George MacDonald, 2 vols (London: Chatto & Windus, 1893), i–ii (the poems quoted are in “A Book of Sonnets”, “Organ Songs”, “Minor Ditties”, “Poems for Children” and “A Threefold Cord”); Rampolli (1897), “Preface to the Translations”, “Hymns to the Night” I–III, and contents. Scotch Songs and Ballads (Aberdeen: John Rae Smith, 1893).
- ↩
A Book of Strife in the Form of the Diary of an Old Soul (privately printed, 1880), dedication; the Longmans reissue is dated 1892 in some bibliographies (unverified); Greville, 497 (Ruskin at Oxford, October 1884); DNB (1912).
- ↩
Diary of an Old Soul, stanzas for the dates given; the count of 366 stanzas and the ababbcc scheme were checked against the text. “Obedience is the one key of life”, sometimes attributed to the Diary, is in US II, “The Word of Jesus on Prayer”.
- ↩
Phantastes: A Faerie Romance for Men and Women (London: Smith, Elder, 1858); epigraphs and chapter mottoes as printed; the motto “In good sooth, my masters …” appears on the title-page of the 1905 edition (Phantastes … A new Edition, with thirty-three new Illustrations by Arthur Hughes; edited by Greville MacDonald, London: Arthur C. Fifield, 1905), with Greville’s preface of September 1905 (“With the copyright I secured also the whole of that edition and turned it into pulp”; “To me it rings with the dominant chord of his life’s purpose and work”); whether the motto stands in the 1858 edition was not checked. For the Spenserian title, Maslen (as in n. 32); for the sales, Greville, 317, and the George MacDonald Society’s account of the book. Lewis’s purchase: letter to Arthur Greeves of 7 March 1916 (“whatever the book you are reading now, you simply MUST get this at once”), and Surprised by Joy (1955), ch. XI (“an Everyman in a dirty jacket, Phantastes, a faerie Romance”). The reviews of 1858 in the Athenaeum and the Spectator, usually summarised as bewildered, were not seen for this entry; see William Raeper, George MacDonald (Tring: Lion, 1987), and Robert Lee Wolff, The Golden Key: A Study of the Fiction of George MacDonald (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), ch. 2.
- ↩
Phantastes, chs I–XXV, as cited in the text. The name Anodos answers to two Greek words of identical form, ἄνοδος the noun (ἀνά + ὁδός, “a way up”, “ascent”) and ἄνοδος the adjective (ἀ-privative + ὁδός, “pathless”); the three senses “without a path”, “a way back” and “a journey upward”, and the ritual anodos of the goddess, are discussed by Fernando Soto, “Chthonic Aspects of MacDonald’s Phantastes: From the Rising of the Goddess to the Anodos of Anodos”, North Wind 19 (2000), 19–49.
- ↩
Wolff, The Golden Key (1961), ch. 2; Soto (as in n. 46); Roukema (as in n. 31), 52, 62 (“The shadow is symbolic of disenchantment, representative of a state of being in which the self sees phenomena as devoid of spiritual essence”); Lewis, Surprised by Joy, ch. XI (“I saw the bright shadow coming out of the book into the real world and resting there, transforming all common things and yet itself unchanged”; “That night my imagination was, in a certain sense, baptized; the rest of me, not unnaturally, took longer”), and preface to the Anthology (1946) (“I should have been shocked in my teens if anyone had told me that what I learned to love in Phantastes was goodness”). The standard modern editions are Nick Page (ed.), Phantastes: The Annotated 150th Anniversary Edition (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2008), and John Pennington and Roderick McGillis (eds), Phantastes: Annotated Edition (Hamden, CT: Winged Lion Press, 2017).
- ↩
Adela Cathcart, 3 vols (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1864), dedication and title-page; The Portent (London: Smith, Elder, 1864), dedication (“To Duncan McColl, Esq., R.N., Huntly”); Greville, 318 (the Cornhill payments). The Cornhill serial of May–July 1860 ended, as far as can be judged from the volume, with the “Chamber of Ghosts” section; the exact point was not checked against the magazine.
- ↩
Adela Cathcart, i, ch. I (“the Swedenborgian resolution”); ii, ch. III (the curate’s sermon-tale quoting Novalis: “In solitude the heavenly heart unfolded itself to a flower-chalice of almighty love”); iii, ch. X (the cemetery dream); “The Cruel Painter”, “The Castle” and “The Bell” as printed in the novel and reprinted in Works of Fancy and Imagination (1871) and The Portent and Other Stories (1909).
- ↩
The Portent, chs I–III (the portent and the nurse’s story), VIII–XVI (Lady Alice, “The First Waking”, “Love and Power”, “The Clanking Shoe”), XV (“The Chamber of Ghosts”), XVII–XXVII (the continuation of 1864; “Freedom” quoted). Greville, 72–73, on the library; Greville, 318, on the second sight, “of which gift my father would reluctantly admit he had himself no trace”.
- ↩
Dealings with the Fairies (London: Alexander Strahan, 1867), with illustrations by Arthur Hughes; Works of Fancy and Imagination, 10 vols (London: Strahan, 1871), vols IX–X (vol. IX contains “Cross Purposes”, “The Golden Key”, “The Carasoyn” and “Little Daylight”; the contents of the set were not otherwise verified); The Light Princess and Other Fairy Tales (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1893). “The Carasoyn” first appeared as “The Fairy Fleet: An English Mährchen” in the Argosy, vol. I, no. V (April 1866), 513 ff., and was expanded for the 1871 collection, in which “The Fairy Fleet” survives as a chapter title; vol. X of the set contains “The Cruel Painter”, “The Castle”, “The Wow o’ Rivven”, “The Broken Swords”, “The Gray Wolf” and “Uncle Cornelius His Story”.
- ↩
“The Light Princess”, chs I–XV; “The Giant’s Heart”; “Cross Purposes”, chs I–IV; “The Shadows”; all quoted from Dealings with the Fairies. The dead “wise prince” and “the mother of her people weeping” in “The Shadows” refer to the death of the Prince Consort in December 1861; the tale was written for Adela Cathcart (1864). Tolkien on “The Giant’s Heart”: “On Fairy-Stories”, in Essays Presented to Charles Williams (London: Oxford University Press, 1947).
- ↩
“The Golden Key”, in Dealings with the Fairies (1867), quoted throughout, including MacDonald’s footnote on Novalis. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories” (1947): “This at least is what George MacDonald attempted, achieving stories of power and beauty when he succeeded, as in The Golden Key (which he called a fairy-tale); and even when he partly failed, as in Lilith (which he called a romance)”; W. H. Auden, afterword to The Golden Key, illustrated by Maurice Sendak (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1967). For Tolkien’s abandoned preface to a Golden Key edition of 1964–65, which grew into Smith of Wootton Major, see the section on Reception. Readings: Colin Manlove, Christian Fantasy: From 1200 to the Present (London: Macmillan, 1992), 168–69, and “‘Not to Hide but to Show’: ‘The Golden Key’”, North Wind 22 (2003), 33–41; the statement, often repeated, that MacDonald said he did not know what “The Golden Key” meant has not been found in Greville or in the letters, and appears to be a transference of his remark about The Portent. Lewis’s remark that in MacDonald “the myth does not essentially exist in words at all” is from the preface to the Anthology (1946).
- ↩
At the Back of the North Wind (London: Strahan, 1871), with illustrations by Arthur Hughes; ch. I. The serial ran in Good Words for the Young from its first number (November 1868) to October 1870; the exact months were not checked against the magazine. The standard modern edition is Roderick McGillis and John Pennington (eds), At the Back of the North Wind (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2011).
- ↩
At the Back of the North Wind, chs I–XXXVIII, as cited; “Little Daylight” is ch. XXVIII. Kegler, “Below in the Depths” (as in n. 20), 33, on Diamond as Maximus Homo; Chesterton, introduction to Greville, 9–11; Lewis, preface to the Anthology (1946); Auden, introduction to The Visionary Novels of George MacDonald, ed. Anne Fremantle (New York: Noonday Press, 1954). For Susy Clemens’s copy, Lindskoog (as in n. 9). Critical essays: John Pennington and Roderick McGillis (eds), Behind the Back of the North Wind: Critical Essays on a Classic (Hamden, CT: Winged Lion Press, 2011).
- ↩
The Princess and the Goblin (London: Strahan, 1872), with illustrations by Arthur Hughes; serialised in Good Words for the Young, November 1870–June 1871 (months not checked). The opening dialogue with “Mr. Author” is printed in later editions (it appears in the American edition of 1920 illustrated by Jessie Willcox Smith, and is absent from some English reprints); whether it stands in the first edition was not checked.
- ↩
The Princess and the Goblin, chs I–XXXII, as cited. The sentence “Seeing is not believing — it is only seeing” is in ch. XXII. Chesterton, introduction to Greville, 9–10: “Of all the stories I have read … it remains the most real, the most realistic, in the exact sense of the phrase the most like life. It is called The Princess and the Goblin … She climbs up the castle stairways to the nursery or the other rooms; but now and again the stairs do not lead to the usual landings”; the phrase often quoted, “the moment when the stair goes up and the stair goes down”, is a paraphrase and not Chesterton’s wording. Roderick McGillis (ed.), For the Childlike: George MacDonald’s Fantasies for Children (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1992).
- ↩
The Wise Woman: A Parable (London: Strahan, 1875); A Double Story (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1876); The Lost Princess; or, The Wise Woman (London: Wells Gardner, Darton, 1895). The serial in Good Things (1874) was not checked against the magazine.
- ↩
The Wise Woman, chs I–XIV, quoted from the American text of A Double Story, which is unchapter-titled.
- ↩
The Princess and Curdie (London: Chatto & Windus, 1883), with illustrations by James Allen; ch. I. The serial in Good Things (January–June 1877) was not checked against the magazine. The attribution of the book to Strahan in the English-language Wikipedia article and elsewhere is an error; the first edition is Chatto & Windus.
- ↩
The Princess and Curdie, chs I–XXXV, as cited; the ending quoted in full from ch. XXXV. Kirstin Jeffrey Johnson, “Curdie’s Intertextual Dialogue: Engaging Maurice, Arnold, and Isaiah”, in Roderick McGillis (ed.), George MacDonald: Literary Heritage and Heirs (Wayne, PA: Zossima Press, 2008), 153–82. For the two Princess books together, Colin Manlove, George MacDonald’s Children’s Fantasies and the Divine Imagination (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2019).
- ↩
The Gifts of the Child Christ, and Other Tales, 2 vols (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1882); Stephen Archer and Other Tales (London: Sampson Low, 1883), contents as printed; “The Gifts of the Child Christ”, final paragraphs. The two-volume edition of 1882 was not seen; its contents are given from the 1883 reissue.
- ↩
“The History of Photogen and Nycteris: A Day and Night Mährchen”, chs I–XX, as cited; reprinted as “The Day Boy and the Night Girl” in later collections and in U. C. Knoepflmacher (ed.), The Complete Fairy Tales (New York: Penguin, 1999).
- ↩
The Flight of the Shadow (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1891), ch. I. The Online Books Page’s date of 1888 for this title is an error.
- ↩
The Flight of the Shadow, chs VI–VIII, XXXII–XXXVI, as cited.
- ↩
Lilith: A Romance (London: Chatto & Windus, 1895), epigraph and notes as printed. On the composition and reception, Greville, 546–49 (“it attracted little notice”; the writing of 1890; “the Revelation of St. George”; the two versions compared), and Rolland Hein (ed.), Lilith: A Variorum Edition (Whitethorn, CA: Johannesen, 1997), which prints the manuscript versions; the number of intermediate drafts was not checked for this entry. The motto “‘Off, Lilith!’ — The Kabala” stands on the title-page of the second edition (London: Chatto & Windus, 1896) and of later reprints; the 1895 Dodd, Mead American edition has none, and the 1895 Chatto & Windus title-page was not seen. Eight manuscript versions are recorded by Michael Phillips (worksofmacdonald.com). Contemporary reviews were not seen; twentieth-century verdicts: James Blish, Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (April 1970), 51–52 (“one of the great originals”); E. F. Bleiler, The Guide to Supernatural Fiction (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1983), 332; Neil Barron (ed.), Fantasy Literature: A Reader’s Guide (New York: Garland, 1990). John Clute and John Grant (eds), The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (London: Orbit, 1997), s.v. “MacDonald, George”, describes the book as premised on “an infinite number of three-dimensional universes … in a four-dimensional frame” and as drawing “heavily from the Talmud”.
- ↩
Lilith, chs I–XLVII, as cited in the text. On the Lilith legend and its Victorian conduits, see the Reception section and Hein’s variorum introduction; the derivation through Rossetti and Goethe is the consensus of the criticism rather than a documented borrowing. Greville, 551–54 (the “Angel-vampire”; the universalists; Blake and the Cemetery). Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories” (1947); Auden, introduction to The Visionary Novels (1954): “George MacDonald is pre-eminently a mythopoeic writer … In his power … to project his inner life into images, events, beings, landscapes which are valid for all, he is one of the most remarkable writers of the nineteenth century” (quoted from the standard accounts; the 1954 printing was not seen); C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1950), ch. VIII (Jadis “comes of your father Adam’s … first wife, her they called Lilith”); Barron (as in n. 66). Recent readings: Faith Mary Hobbis, MPhil thesis on Lilith (University of Glasgow, 2002); Ayumi Kumabe, “Seeing from Women’s Points of View: The Female Sight and Body in Lilith”, North Wind 43 (2024).
- ↩
Lewis, preface to George MacDonald: An Anthology (1946). The eleven Scottish novels are David Elginbrod, Alec Forbes, Robert Falconer, Malcolm, The Marquis of Lossie, Sir Gibbie, Castle Warlock, Donal Grant, What’s Mine’s Mine, Heather and Snow and Salted with Fire. For the Bethany House abridgements (from The Fisherman’s Lady, Minneapolis, 1982, “edited for the modern reader, with much of the Scottish dialect translated”) and their effect, see Michael Phillips’s own account at worksofmacdonald.com and the list compiled at theroomtoroam.com (“By George! (Or Not?)”); no sales figures have been published. First-edition data for the novels after 1877 are given from the Online Books Page, the DNB and the title-pages of the texts consulted, and the volume counts marked in these notes as unverified should be checked against Shaberman’s bibliography (as in n. 37).
- ↩
David Elginbrod, 3 vols (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1863): dedication and title-page motto as printed; Book I, ch. IX (Boehme epigraph) and ch. XIII (“Heraldry”: the epitaph and the Aurora); Book II, chs XVII–XXI (the séances; chapter titles as printed); Book III, chs VI, VII, XI, XII (“possession indeed”; “The kingdom of heaven …”), XVIII (“I dare not …”), XXIV (the primrose; Novalis). Greville, 322 (Miss Mulock; £90); Greville, 302 (Zamoiski). The Times and Globe notices as quoted in the publisher’s advertisements; The Reader (1863), review transcribed on the Victorian Web. The passage in Book III, ch. VII, referring the reader to what the author has told “elsewhere” of Robert Falconer appears in the later one-volume text and may not be in the 1863 edition.
- ↩
Alec Forbes of Howglen, 3 vols (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1865), chs LXIII–LXV (the flood; Tibbie’s dream), XCII (the Arctic), XCIII (the close); Greville, 60 (Malison’s original); the Athenaeum and Daily News notices and Dodgson’s remark on Annie (“one of the most delightful I have ever met with in fiction”) are quoted in the publisher’s advertisements and in the standard accounts, and were not checked against their sources. For the Kailyard controversy and its answer, David S. Robb, George MacDonald (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1987), and “George MacDonald and the Grave Livers of Scotland”, in Christopher MacLachlan, John Patrick Pazdziora and Ginger Stelle (eds), Rethinking George MacDonald: Contexts and Contemporaries (Glasgow: Scottish Literature International, 2013).
- ↩
Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood, 3 vols (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1867), chs VIII, IX (“a volume of Jacob Behmen”), XI, XXVI, XXIX, XXX, XXXII, XXXIV; the serial ran in the Sunday Magazine from October 1865 to September 1866 (Jarndyce catalogue). The dedication of the first edition was not checked.
- ↩
Guild Court: A London Story, 3 vols (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1868), chs XLVI, LV, LVI; serialised in Good Words (1867).
- ↩
Robert Falconer, 3 vols (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1868), dedication as printed; Part I, chs XI, XII (the “plan of salvation” and “I believe in hell”), XXIII (“An Auto da Fé”); Part II, chs XVI, XXIV; Part III, chs VIII, IX, XI, XII–XV, XVIII, XX–XXI; the serialisation in The Argosy (1867–68) is given in the standard bibliographies but was not checked. Lindskoog (as in n. 9) for Twain’s reading of 1870; Philip Hickok, “God and Gender in Robert Falconer: Deifying the Feminine”, in Rethinking George MacDonald (2013).
- ↩
The Seaboard Parish, 3 vols (London: Tinsley Brothers, 1868), i, chs II, V; iii, chs II, VII–VIII, and epilogue.
- ↩
Ranald Bannerman’s Boyhood (London: Strahan, 1871); Gutta-Percha Willie: The Working Genius (London: Henry S. King, 1873), ch. XXIV.
- ↩
Wilfrid Cumbermede: An Autobiographical Story, 3 vols (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1872), introduction and chs VII, XIV, XVII, XXXIX–XLIV, LIII, LVII, LX–LXV; Greville, 351 (the La Touche affair); Adelheid Kegler, “Wilfrid Cumbermede: A Novel in the Context of European Symbolism”, North Wind 21 (2002), 71–84, at 72; Lewis, preface to the Anthology (1946). The statement in some accounts that this was MacDonald’s own favourite among his novels has not been traced to any source.
- ↩
The Vicar’s Daughter, 3 vols (London: Tinsley Brothers, 1872), chs XVII–XX, XXVII, XLIV; Jeffrey W. Smith, “George MacDonald’s Approach to Victorian Social Reform in The Vicar’s Daughter”, in Rethinking George MacDonald (2013). The identification of Marion Clare with Octavia Hill is standard in the biographies (Raeper, 1987; Hein, 1993) and consistent with Greville, 380, but is not stated by MacDonald.
- ↩
Malcolm, 3 vols (London: Henry S. King, 1875), chs III, VII, XXVII (the Gernon legend and the prophecy), XXX, XLII, XLIII, XLVII, LXIII, LXV–LXX; The Marquis of Lossie, 3 vols (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1877), chs XV, XXXI, XLIV, XLIX, LXXI–LXXII; Arnold Bennett, Literary Taste: How to Form It (London: New Age Press, 1909), 104, lists “George Macdonald, Malcolm” (the statement that later editions replaced it with Sir Gibbie was not confirmed in the editions to 1927); Princeton University Library catalogue record for The Fisherman’s Lady (Minneapolis: Bethany House, 1982). Michael Phillips, George MacDonald, Cullen, and Malcolm (2019), on the Cullen setting.
- ↩
St George and St Michael, 3 vols (London: Henry S. King, 1876), chs XV, XVI, XXIX, XXXVII–XXXVIII, XLVI–XLVII, XLIX–LVI, and the closing note on sources; serialised in The Graphic (Jarndyce catalogue).
- ↩
Thomas Wingfold, Curate, 3 vols (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1876), i, chs V, XV, XVIII, XXVII, XXVIII; ii, ch. VII; iii, chs III, XVII, XXV, XXXI; Paul Faber, Surgeon, 3 vols (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1879), dedication as printed, chs XXIV, XXXII, LIV. The identification of “W.C.T.” with William Cowper-Temple is the obvious one (Greville, 472–79, for the friendship in 1877–78) but is not stated in the book. The drug of Thomas Wingfold is not named; the description of dilated time suggests hashish.
- ↩
Sir Gibbie, 3 vols (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1879; also Philadelphia: Lippincott), chs VI, VIII, XI, XXI, XXV–XXVII, XXXII–XXXVII, LVIII–LXII; the Glasgow Weekly Mail serialisation (1878–79) is given in the standard bibliographies but was not checked. Lewis, preface to the Anthology (1946); Elizabeth Yates’s abridgement (New York: Dutton, 1963); The Baronet’s Song (Bethany House, 1983).
- ↩
Mary Marston, 3 vols (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1881), chs XII (“Mary’s Dream”), XIII, LVII; Castle Warlock: A Homely Romance, 3 vols (London: Sampson Low, 1882), chs VII, XII–XVII, LV and the closing poem; Weighed and Wanting, 3 vols (London: Sampson Low, 1882), ch. XXXVII and the closing chapters. The volume counts of these three, and of Donal Grant, There and Back and Salted with Fire below, are those of the standard bibliographies and were not verified against copies.
- ↩
Donal Grant, 3 vols (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, 1883), chs XXII (“A Talk about Ghosts”), XLI (“The Music-Nest”), XLVI, XLVIII, XLIX, LVI, LIX, LXIII, LXXV–LXXVI, LXXXI, LXXXIV; Kegler, “Below in the Depths” (as in n. 20), 36.
- ↩
What’s Mine’s Mine, 3 vols (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, 1886), i, ch. XI; ii, chs II, III, VII, X; iii, chs I, XXI.
- ↩
Home Again: A Tale (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, 1887); The Elect Lady (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, 1888), chs XVI, XXXV, XXXVI; A Rough Shaking (London: Blackie, 1891), dedication dated Hampstead, 26 August 1890, and ch. I.
- ↩
There and Back, 3 vols (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1891), chs XXI–XXII, XLIII, LXIV–LXVI.
- ↩
Heather and Snow, 2 vols (London: Chatto & Windus, 1893), chs VI, XVIII, XXV, XXIX, XLIII.
- ↩
Salted with Fire (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1897), chs II, XI, XXI, XXV–XXVI; Greville, 546 (“his last book of all”; the original title Salted with Fire: A Minister’s Story); Far Above Rubies (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1898), first printed in The Sketch; Phillips’s site gives 1899 for the American book and “it never appeared in book form in the U.K.”
- ↩
Unspoken Sermons (London: Alexander Strahan, 1867), title-page and dedication; Unspoken Sermons, Second Series (London: Longmans, Green, 1885), dedication; Unspoken Sermons, Third Series (London: Longmans, Green, 1889), dedication. Ruskin’s sentence is from his letter of 18 December 1868 from Denmark Hill, printed by Greville, 337–38 (“They are the best sermons — beyond all compare — I have ever read, and if ever sermons did good, these will. Pages 23, 24 are very beautiful — unspeakably beautiful. If they were but true —”). Lewis, preface to George MacDonald: An Anthology (1946). The epigraph ἔπεα ἄπτερα is modelled on Homer’s ἔπεα πτερόεντα, “winged words”, and on the Odyssey’s ἄπτερος μῦθος (17.57 and elsewhere), the word that “stays unwinged”, that is, unspoken; MacDonald gives no gloss, and the reading offered here is the natural one.
- ↩
The sermons are cited by series and title, as in the notes to Thought above. TIME (2 June 1947) described the Anthology as “365 aphorisms and passages drawn from the three volumes of Unspoken Sermons, designed as daily readings”; Lewis’s preface: “the texture of his writing as a whole is undistinguished, at times fumbling”, and “Nowhere else outside the New Testament have I found terror and comfort so intertwined” (the first of these sentences is quoted from the standard accounts and was not checked against the 1946 printing).
- ↩
The Miracles of Our Lord (London: Strahan, 1870), dedication (checked in the 1896 reprint) and chs I, II, VII, VIII, X, XI, XII; whether the papers appeared in a periodical before the book was not established; the footnote on “a hastening of appearances” is reprinted in US I. Daniel Gabelman, “‘Divine Alchemy’: The Miracles of Our Lord in its Context”, in Rethinking George MacDonald (2013).
- ↩
England’s Antiphon (London: Macmillan, 1868), preface, introduction, and chs VII, XIII, XVI, XVII, XVIII, XIX, XXI, XXIII. Greville, 547 n., on its reception (“If his England’s Antiphon (1874) … had a better reception, it was due, I almost think, to its issue by Macmillan as one in a series ‘for Sunday reading’”).
- ↩
Orts (London: Sampson Low, 1882); A Dish of Orts (London: Sampson Low, Marston, 1893), preface and contents as printed, with the dates given in the volume’s footnotes; the essays quoted as cited. The exact contents of Orts (1882) were not checked; the 1893 preface implies that “The Fantastic Imagination” was the only addition.
- ↩
The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke: A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 (London: Longmans, Green, 1885), dedication and preface; Greville, 547 (“that masterly example of scholarly and inspired criticism … was condemned and passed by”).
- ↩
The Hope of the Gospel (London: Ward, Lock, Bowden, 1892), the sermons as cited; The Hope of the Gospel, with an introduction by Kirstin Jeffrey Johnson (worksofmacdonald.com/Wingfold, 2023).
- ↩
Greville, 552 (the preface to Letters from Hell, “given in English by L. W. J. S., with a preface by George MacDonald, LL.D.”, London: Richard Bentley & Son, 1884, quoted by Greville from its p. vi); the Wingfold index of lecture reports (worksofmacdonald.com, “Lectures”); George MacDonald in the Pulpit: The “Spoken” Sermons of George MacDonald, compiled by J. Joseph Flynn and David Edwards (Whitethorn, CA: Johannesen, 1996); Rolland Hein (ed.), Creation in Christ: Unspoken Sermons (Wheaton, IL: Harold Shaw, 1976); Michael R. Phillips (ed.), Discovering the Character of God (Minneapolis: Bethany House, 1989) and Knowing the Heart of God (1990); The Gospel in George MacDonald: Selections from His Novels, Fairy Tales, and Spiritual Writings, ed. Marianne Wright (Walden, NY: Plough, 2016).
- ↩
Greville, 317 (Phantastes), 322 (David Elginbrod), 425 (Redpath), 479 (the pension), 497 (Ruskin and the Diary), 547 (Hamlet; Lilith); The Reader (1863) on David Elginbrod; Ruskin on the sermons (as in n. 89); Greville, 457–58, for the Twain correspondence (“The two writers were very intimate and had discussed co-operation in a novel together, so as to secure copyright on both sides of the Atlantic”) and Twain’s letter to Howells of 1899 (“a little old copy in the nursery of At the Back of the North Wind … how Susy loved it!”); Lindskoog (as in n. 9) for Twain’s “self-righteous humbug” and “hogwash” (1870) and the letter to Howells of 1899; the Manchester Guardian obituary of 19 September 1905. Sales figures for the novels have not been published.
- ↩
Chesterton, Autobiography (1936), ch. VII, 171–72, and introduction to Greville, 9–14; the “three or four greatest men” sentence circulates without a reference and was not found in the Autobiography or in the introduction of 1924. Lewis, Surprised by Joy (1955), ch. XI; letter to Arthur Greeves, 7 March 1916; The Problem of Pain (1940), epigraph; The Great Divorce (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1945 [dated 1946]), chs 9–13; preface to George MacDonald: An Anthology (1946); The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), ch. VIII; Kirstin Jeffrey Johnson, “‘The Curdie Books, Please’: C. S. Lewis’ Co-Creative Reading in That Hideous Strength”, Sehnsucht 5:1 (2012), 43–66, and “What C. S. Lewis Learned from his ‘Master’”, Christian History 113 (2015). Auden, introduction to The Visionary Novels (1954). Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories” (1947); Letters, no. 262 (7 September 1964: “I am not as warm an admirer of George MacDonald as C. S. Lewis was”); Humphrey Carpenter, J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1977), 244 (the abandoned preface and Smith of Wootton Major); Verlyn Flieger (ed.), Smith of Wootton Major, extended edition (London: HarperCollins, 2005), which prints the draft preface; the interview with Henry Resnick, Niekas 18 (1967) (“a horrible old grandmother”); the letter on the Ents and the manuscript note on re-reading MacDonald “critically” are recorded in Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull, The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Reader’s Guide (London: HarperCollins, 2006), 570–71. The sentence “Death is the theme that most inspired George MacDonald”, often quoted as from “On Fairy-Stories”, is not in the published essay; it belongs to Tolkien’s manuscript drafts, printed in Verlyn Flieger and Douglas A. Anderson (eds), Tolkien On Fairy-stories (London: HarperCollins, 2008). L’Engle’s phrase is usually attributed to Walking on Water (1980) and Chambers’s to Christian Disciplines; neither was verified. Clute and Grant (as in n. 66) on Lindsay.
- ↩
The works are listed in the Bibliography. Wolff (1961); Reis (1972); Prickett (1976, 1979); Hein (1982, 1993, 1997); Manlove (1975, 1992, 2003, 2016, 2019); Raeper (1987, 1990); Robb (1987); Phillips (1987); Nelson (1989); Kegler (1991, 2002, 2005); Docherty (1995); Soto (2000); Roukema (2012); Gaarden (2011); Dearborn (2006); Gabelman (2013); Kreglinger (2014); Larsen (2018); Johnson (2011); Rethinking George MacDonald (2013); Informing the Inklings (2018); Page (2008); Pennington and McGillis (2017); McGillis and Pennington (2011); Knoepflmacher (1999); Sadler (1994); Shaberman (1990). Wolff’s thesis is summarised from the standard accounts; his text was not consulted for this entry. The reviews of Dearborn by Gaarden (North Wind 26, 2007) and Kirstin Jeffrey Johnson (“A Critical Reinstatement”, VII 27 (2010), 93–98) are the best short guides to the theological scholarship.
- ↩
The George MacDonald Society’s first newsletter, Orts no. 1, is dated 1981 (the Society’s website gives 1985 for its formal constitution); North Wind vols 1 (1982)–43 (2024) at digitalcommons.snc.edu/northwind; Wingfold contents 1993–2021 indexed by the Wade Center; Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, George MacDonald Collection, GEN MSS 103; King’s College London Archives, K/PP82. Bicentenary conferences: Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College, “George MacDonald and the Prophetic Imagination: A Bicentenary Conference”, 29–31 May 2024; St Mary’s College, St Andrews, “Borderlands: George MacDonald Between Worlds”, 8–10 November 2024 (keynotes Paul Fiddes, Alison Milbank, Mark Knight and Kirstin Jeffrey Johnson; papers to be considered for a special issue of the Scottish Literary Review, not yet published as of vol. 18:1, 2026); Yale Institute of Sacred Music, “The Genius of George MacDonald”, 13–15 December 2024. The Brill Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism (2005) and Arthur Versluis’s Wisdom’s Children: A Christian Esoteric Tradition (Albany: SUNY Press, 1999) were searched for MacDonald’s name without result; their indexes were not consulted in print.