George MacDonald. An Antology (edited by C.S.Lewis) -
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his own expense an ugly riot in which he was being burned in effigy. He
forbade his son to touch a saddle until he had learned to ride well without
one. He advised him "to give over the fruitless game of poetry." He asked
from him, and obtained, a promise to renounce tobacco at the age of
twenty-three. On the other hand he objected to grouse shooting on the score
of cruelty and had in general a tenderness for animals not very usual among
farmers more than a hundred years ago; and his son reports that he never, as
boy or man, asked him for anything without getting what he asked. Doubtless
this tells us as much about the son's character as the father's and should
be taken in connection with our extract on prayer (104). "He who seeks the
Father more than anything He can give, is likely to have what he asks, for
he is not likely to ask amiss." The theological maxim is rooted in the
experiences of the author's childhood. This is what may be called the
"anti-Freudian predicament" in operation.
George MacDonald's family (though hardly his father) were of course
Calvinists. On the intellectual side his history is largely a history of
escape from the theology in which he had been brought up. Stories of such
emancipation are common in the nineteenth century; but George MacDonald's
story belongs to this familiar pattern only with a difference. In most such
stories the emancipated person, not content with repudiating the doctrines,
comes also to hate the persons, of his forebears, and even the whole culture
and way of life with which they are associated. Thus books like The Way of
All flesh come to be written; and later generations, if they do not
swallow
the satire wholesale as history, at least excuse the author for a