University of Virginia Library

The Writings of George MacDonald.
Samuel W. Duffield

IN something less than three years we have become acquainted with a new name in literature. It has drifted to us across the Atlantic, and with it has come a vague hint of a personality whereof in future we may know more. The works of this hand and brain are mainly in a poetical prose, with an occasional relapse into verse. His books sell largely, and he is better known as "the author of Annals of a Quiet Neighborhood" than as George MacDonald.

Lately he appears among us as the editor of Good Words for the Young, always, however, forgetting the prefix "Rev.," and carrying that balancing "LL.D." as "the draigon" of his own Robert Falconer carried the weight which steadied her in mid-air. We hear of him as a tall man, of earnest demeanor and shaggy beard, proclaiming now and then in clear and forcible speech his own peculiar doctrines of "righteousness, temperance, and judgment to come." He is reputed to have the ear of his audience on these rare occasions, and certainly, if the humanity of his books is a test, he deserves it.

As far back as Phantastes, a Faery Romance, his imaginative style seems to have begun. Within and Without, a poem of about the same date, shows more deliberate thought — perhaps more metaphysics than poetry. But these two books, which were at the beginning of his fame (if indeed he had no share in the composition of The Green Hand, a Short Yarn), have been entirely displaced to American readers by other and more mature productions.

First, we had as reprints, Alec Forbes of Howglen, and Guild Court, a London Story. To these succeeded the importation of The Disciple and Other Poems, another volume entitled Unspoken Sermons, and the Annals of a Quiet Neighborhood, with its sequel, The Seaboard Parish. Next came David Elginbrod and Robert Falconer, both reprints; and current literature was at the same date refreshed by a series of articles on the Miracles of Our Lord, in the Sunday Magazine, and by Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood, and At the Back of the North Wind, in Good Words for the Young.

In attendance upon these, Mr. MacDonald sent forth a volume of the Sunday Library, uniform with Chas. Kingsley's Hermits and Miss Yonge's Pupils of St. John the Divine, which was styled England's Antiphon. It is a most important contribution to our knowledge of the singers and songs of the English Church.

In all these books there is a vein of consistent, fresh, original thought, often expressed in language extremely apt and powerful. It tends towards the religious at all times, and particularly it tends to that blunt plainness as to hypocrisy and cant and sham of every kind in which our dear departed masters, Thackeray and Dickens, took the lead. But to compare Mr. MacDonald with either, or with both, would be unfair. He has not the same elements in him. He cannot, if he would, write in their light, easy, man-of-the-world style, which, like Saladin's scimetar [sic], cuts deep and to the quick.

As his is now a considerable place among us, I have thought that a résumé of his method and writings might aid in a fuller appreciation of the man's actual talent — not to say his genius of a certain sort.

His novels are, with one exception, Scotch in scene, and with a great deal of the dialect about them. Their central figure is much the same — a boy, who, while a hearty, active lad, nevertheless has his fancies and his thoughts. This fine fellow's life possesses many points of humor — especially in Alec Forbes — and introduces scenes and pictures which are at times simply exquisite. This education of the hero evolves the æsthetic from its lurking-place within him. A female presence casts a halo of protecting beauty and goodness over his path. He has stalwart male friends — adherents of the cast-iron theology of the North, or else scapegraces of a droll and facetious turn, in whom he detects the good beneath the bad. He generally befriends or finds in the horizon of his career some forsaken boy, of a curious devotedness. Relatives

or near friends, of the pure Scottish type, are around him, who, like Falconer's grandmother, have warm hearts under bosoms calmly cold. And, as nearly as words can achieve it, we have a process of photography going on from the day we set eyes upon our principal actor until he goes off the stage, with the closing of the book.

For all this, Mr. MacDonald's abundant observation, fruitful fancy, and thorough sympathy, fit him excellently well. Leaving out such eccentric persons as Count Halko, in David Elginbrod, who practises mesmerism and electrical bewilderments, his characters stick to common facts, and invest ordinary things with the charm of spicy conversation, and a minuteness which never degenerates into tedious recapitulation. Wit sparkles in the speech of Cosmo Cupples as naturally as a brook laughs in the sun, and you may be profoundly sure that the talk will ripple freshly up whenever any obstruction appears in the channel.

The books are of their own kind. They are professedly of high intention — the later ones, by which I do not mean our latest reprints, being the best. One cannot read them without being stimulated to something nobler and purer, for they may honestly be called both. They are a mine of original and quaint similitudes, and their deep perceptions of human nature are certainly remarkable. To have realized some of the scenes as he has, Mr. MacDonald must have known the student-life of Aberdeen, and the boy-life of a little Scotch town. Nature, from smallest to largest, must have been carefully under his notice. And in the world, so wide as it is to all of us, he has seen the little flower grow up in a life, or the great storm sweep over it.

This is notably the case in the Annals of a Quiet Neighborhood, and its sequel, the latter being by no means the best. Here he is shown as a close pathologist. Disease of mind and disease of body, as influencing or off-setting each other, he has acutely studied. As a matter of art, the London Spectator was right when it called this application of knowledge in this book "something wonderful." The sentences sometimes are like the soliloquy of one thinking aloud upon creation, chaos, and infinity. And of course, as this is from the clergyman's standpoint, Mr. MacDonald is freer, more natural, and (except in Alec Forbes) more successful here than anywhere else.

On the whole, Mr. George MacDonald is a power already, and will soon be a greater one. If we fully agree with him, we shall grow enthusiastic over his earnest defence of his ideas. If we differ from him, it will be with the respect due to an honorable opponent who hits hard, and whom it requires skill and brains to meet. Let it stand to his credit, that in an age of loose literature he is, like Scott and Dickens and Thackeray, pure-minded. He writes better English (because more imaginative and loftier) than Charles Reade, or any of that ilk. And while Wilkie Collins outdoes him in plot, he outdoes Wilkie Collins and the rest of the plotters in delicacy and sweetness of touch. But it is already too plan that (unless he gets more leisure) the work which he has done, and which the world has on its bookshelves, will be the best of his doing. Should George MacDonald rise hereafter above this present point, high and good as it is, he will merit and receive distinguished praise. And, as a man hardly at the entrance of middle-life, there is no reason why this should not be. His hand has not lost its cunning, and his eye is still undimmed.