George MacDonald. An Antology (edited by C.S.Lewis) -
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one-sidedness which a man in his circumstances could hardly have been
expected to avoid. Of such personal resentment I find no trace in MacDonald.
It is not we who have to find extenuating circumstances for his point of
view. On the contrary, it is he himself, in the very midst of his
intellectual revolt, who forces us, whether we will or no, to see elements
of real and perhaps irreplaceable worth in the thing from which he is
revolting.
All his life he continued to love the rock from which he had been hewn.
All that is best in his novels carries us back to that "kaleyard" world of
granite and heather, of bleaching greens beside burns that look as if they
flowed not with water but with stout, to the thudding of wooden machinery,
the oatcakes, the fresh milk, the pride, the poverty, and the passionate
love of hard-won learning. His best characters are those which reveal how
much real charity and spiritual wisdom can coexist with the profession of a
theology that seems to encourage neither. His own grandmother, a truly
terrible old woman wo had burnt his uncle's fiddle as a Satanic snare, might
well have appeared to him as what is now (inaccurately) called "a mere
sadist." Yet when something very like her is delineated in Robert
Falconer
and again in What's Mine's Mine, we are compelled to look deeper-to
see,
inside the repellent crust, something that we can wholeheartedly pity and
even, with reservations, respect. In this way MacDonald illustrates, not the
doubtful maxim that to know all is to forgive all, but the unshakeable truth
that to forgive is to know. He who loves, sees.
He was born in 1824 at Huntly in Aberdeenshire and entered King's
College at Aberdeen in 1840. In 1842 he spent some months in the North of