George MacDonald. An Antology (edited by C.S.Lewis) -
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MacDonald shows God threatening, but (as Jeremy Taylor says) "He threatens
terrible things if we will not be happy."
In many respects MacDonald's thought has, in a high degree, just those
excellences which his period and his personal history would lead us to
expect least. A romantic, escaping from a drily intellectual theology, might
easily be betrayed into valuing mere emotion and "religious experience" too
highly: but in fact few nineteenth-century writers are more firmly catholic
in relegating feeling to its proper place. (See Numbers 1, 27, 28, 37, 39,
351.) His whole philosophy of Nature (Numbers 52, 67, 150, 151, 184, 185,
187, 188, 189, 285) with its resolute insistence on the concrete, owes
little to the thought of an age which hovered between mechanism and
idealism; he would obviously have been more at home with Professor Whitehead
than with Herbert Spencer or T. H. Green. Number 285 seems to me
particularly admirable. All romantics are vividly aware of mutability, but
most of them are content to bewail it: for MacDonald this nostalgia is
merely the starting point-he goes on and discovers what it is made for. His
psychology also is worth noticing: he is quite as well aware as the moderns
that the conscious self, the thing revealed by introspection, is a
superficies. Hence the cellars and attics of the King's castle in The
Princess and the Goblins, and the terror of his own house which falls
upon
Mr. Vane in Lilith: hence also his formidable critique (201) of our
daily
assumptions about the self. Perhaps most remarkable of all is the function-a
low and primitive, yet often indispensable function-which he allows to Fear
in the spiritual life (Numbers 3, 5, 6, 7, 137, 142, 143, 349). Reaction