George MacDonald. An Antology (edited by C.S.Lewis) -
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which agnostics attribute to chance and Christians to Providence. It is
against this background of reiterated failure and incessant peril that some
of the following extracts can be most profitably read. His resolute
condemnations of anxiety come from one who has a right to speak; nor does
their tone encourage the theory that they owe anything to the pathological
wishful thinking-the spes phthisica-of the consumptive. None of the
evidence
suggests such a character. His peace of mind came not from building on the
future but from resting in what he called "the holy Present." His
resignation to poverty (see Number 274) was at the opposite pole from that
of the stoic. He appears to have been a sunny, playful man, deeply
appreciative of all really beautiful and delicious things that money can
buy, and no less deeply content to do without them. It is perhaps
significant-it is certainly touching-that his chief recorded weakness was a
Highland love of finery; and he was all his life hospitable as only the poor
can be.
In making these extracts I have been concerned with MacDonald not as a
writer but as a Christian teacher. If I were to deal with him as a writer, a
man of letters, I should be faced with a difficult critical problem. If we
define Literature as an art whose medium is words, then certainly MacDonald
has no place in its first rank- perhaps not even in its second. There are
indeed passages, many of them in this collection, where the wisdom and (I
would dare to call it) the holiness that are in him triumph over and even
burn away the baser elements in his style: the expression becomes precise,
weighty, economic; acquires a cutting edge. But he does not maintain this
level for long. The texture of his writing as a whole is undistinguished, at