The Library

SCHOOL OF THEOLOGY AT CLAREMONT

WEST FOOTHILL AT COLLEGE AVENUE _ CLAREMONT, CALIFORNIA

GEORGE MACDONALD

AND HIS WIFE

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SOME PRESS OPINIONS.

‘A long book, but not too long. Dr. MacDonald has a striking personality to make known to us. A crowded story of thought and suffering and friendship and, above all, of joy.’’—Times Literary Supplement.

“George MacDonald was no ordinary man, and this is no

ordinary biography. . . . It is the view of an artist by an artist.” —Sunday Times. ‘A volume worthy of the man. . .. Reveals a fine picture of

stoical manhood and Christian faith.’”-—Daily Chronicle.

‘‘Dr. MacDonald has reared a noble monument to his parents. . . . As preacher, poet, novelist, heretic, mystic, MacDonald always seemed to be seeking a higher standpoint, a clearer air, a more unclouded view of truth.” —British Weekly.

“‘This life of a modern saint... . George MacDonald was a wonderful person. He stood on the heights of spirituality.”— KATHARINE TYNAN in Bookman.

«*A noble monument of filial devotion. . . . It should enhance George MacDonald’s reputation by revealing him . . . as not only the ‘lover of God’ but a fervent ‘lover of his fellow-men,’ even greater in character than in genius.””—Scotsman.

“9

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Photo by] [Eliott & Fry GEORGE MACDONALD, LL.D., 1892

~ GEORGE MACDONALD ‘AND HIS WIFE

BY

GREVILLE MACDONALD, M.D.

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY

G. K. CHESTERTON

TWENTY-EIGHT ILLUSTRATIONS

LONDON: GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD. ‘RUSKIN HOUSE, 40 MUSEUM STREET, W.C.1 *

First published in

May, 1 924 Second Ldition, Sep

tember, 1924

(All rights reserved)

Printed in Great Britain

FOREWORD

To is the hundredth year since George Mac-

Donald’s birth, and the time is ripe for reminding

the world of a spiritual genius whose art was so rare that, had he confined himself to poetry and purely imaginative story-telling, he could not have been almost forgotten. His fairy-tales and allegorical fantasies were epoch-making in the lives of multitudes, children and parents alike, and still are widely read. His novels, not only those which, conceived in his native country, inaugurated a new school in Scottish literature, but his stories of English life also, stirred the religious world to its depths and left their impress direct or mediate on the deeper thought of the whole English-speaking world. .

The story here given tells of a long struggle against prejudice and contumely, poverty, ill-health and bitter griefs, yet all endured triumphantly because of the man’s love for truth and his wife’s vigilant ministration. Apart altogether from their significance in the intellec- tual and religious history of the age, its events, now that they are set down, look as though they just had to be chronicled. They give so realistic a picture of domestic and widely shared happiness three generations back that, with present- day customs on all sides usurping the time- honoured instinct for family joys and responsibilities, they should set many asking, What then are the riches we have flung away? Indeed, so simple, faithful and happy were this father and mother, so full their lives of pathos and humour, that it seems right to give their history in full detail.

There was nothing to conceal, and nothing has been concealed. Some who have given the writer

1

ee hool of Theology 41 ee . a aint

2 GEORGE MACDONALD

much help have thought certain points too intimate for publication. On the other hand, only those capable of loving this man and wife for their courage, their tender- ness, and their wide hospitalities will be much interested ; and it is to these only the book can lie open and reveal its sanctities. Were the story produced a hundred years hence, its method would never be questioned— even though no hand like the present compiler’s, duti- fully in love with its subjects, could be found for the task.

As matter of fact, George MacDonald had expressed a hope that his Life would not be written: his message was all in his books, and no biography could add to it. But against acquiescence in such hope, stands one fact that he could not have foreseen. To the astonishment of the family, there was published immediately after his death a life of George MacDonald, incorrect, imperfect, and with little understanding of his place in the literary world, notwithstanding the writer’s evident love and admiration for his subject. Hence it seemed right that with the wonderful letters now available, the biography should be undertaken by one who, however limited his abilities, owed to George and Louisa MacDonald everything shared so much of their joy and sorrow, and witnessed their victory over the common tragedy of life. There is not anything herein set down but facts and truths, criticisms and admirations, which he feels that his parents, were they now at his side, while yet inhabiting that larger life for which they lived and _ suffered, would approve: “If it is to help our grandchildren to live nobly and the world to love purely, then God be with your telling of our story!”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

friends of the writer and lovers of his parents for the help ~ they have given. Without the material contributed from all parts of the globe, from all sects and grades of British, Irish and American lovers of George MacDonald, the book had never been written; without friends’ encouragement over a work that has proved almost as heartrending as delightful, without their sympa- thetic criticism of the script, readers of its final form might have suffered much from its imperfections.

First among these friends must be named the late Sir William Robertson Nicoll, who, having read the first half of the book, believed it would prove “‘ one of the fullest records of a victorious faith in the whole history of the Christian Church”; but he did not live to read the second half. The book is in the next place indebted to Mrs. Crawford Noble of Aberdeen, George MacDonald’s youngest sister, for having rescued from threatened flames a long series of letters from him to their father, almost every one of which is included. The writer’s cousin, Robert Troup, of The Farm, Huntly, has been very helpful in contributing local and family information, while a more distant relative, Dr. John MacDonald of Kildrummy and William Will of The Graphic, have lent descriptive documents. Mrs. Arthur Morley Francis, Mrs. George MacDonald’s sister, had set down at the writer’s request, and in view of this work, many and delightful particulars about her own family in the ’forties ; but she died in 1910. The writer’s sister, Mrs. Cecil Brewer, has been wise and helpful in many suggestions. To James A. Campbell of Barbreck, learned in Celtic lore and Scottish history, and to Ernest Rhys warm thanks are due for pointed and illuminating criticism. Sir Leonard Powell and Mrs. Henry Hett have contributed certain useful items, the latter lending some early unpublished verse. Miss Rose Goodwin, more intimate with George MacDonald’s works than anyone the writer knows, has given him sympathetic aid; and the Rev. Cyril H. Valentine of Arundel has helped with some apposite details; while a fellow student of George MacDonald, the Rev. Charles Green’s reminiscences of their theological college are full of point and atmosphere; and Mrs. W. Carey Davies has lent invaluable letters. Last, but not least, to Joseph King, the writer’s cousin, and his wife, Maude

3

i \HE opportunity must not pass without thanking the many

4, GEORGE MACDONALD

Egerton King, thanks are rendered for their patient weighings and endorsement.

The list of those who have sent contributions, many of them referred to in the text, and who have given permission to publish letters, is a long one. Lady Lovelace and Lady Wentworth, have allowed the printing of Lady Byron’s letters to George MacDonald ; Mrs. Arthur Severn and Mr. Alexander Wedderburn, K.C., have sanctioned the inclusion of Ruskin’s letters; Mr. and Mrs. C. Edmund Maurice have permitted the use of letters of Frederick Denison Maurice and Octavia Hill. The Hon. Wilfrid Ashley has approved the printing of a letter of Lord Mount-Temple and some extracts from his privately printed Memorials; Miss Rosamond Gilder, daughter of the late Richard Watson Gilder of New York, has granted the loan*of her father’s letters with full discretion in dealing with them. Albert Bigelow Paine, Mark Twain’s biographer, has given permission to reprint a letter and certain words of appreciation. A few letters of other old friends of the family have been printed without their representatives’ permission, it proving impossible to discover them. Messrs. G. Michelmore, of 5, Royal Opera Arcade, S.W., and Mr. C. Richardson, of 42a, Rosamond Street, Chorlton-on-Medlock, Manchester, both firms being booksellers, have generously given the writer access to certain autograph letters of George MacDonald; while Messrs. Elliott and Fry have disinterestedly allowed the reproduction of several copy- right photographs.

Many other contributions, such as full notes of George MacDonald’s lectures and sermons, personal incidents, declarations of his influence over people’s lives and thoughts, have been sent, and should be included but for lack of space. The text is nevertheless indebted much to these kindnesses, for they give sense of his real spiritual dynamic.

Lastly, to Mr. Stanley Unwin, the publisher, more than formal thanks are due for his appreciation of George MacDonald’s true place in literature, and his sympathy with the biographer in difficulties inseparable from a work of this nature.

FOREWORD ° °

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 5 . é ° . . .

INTRODUCTION ry < . . ° . ° ° BOOK I

"tae BOYHOOD AND YOUTH

I. II. III. Iv. Vv. Vi. VII. Vill.

I. II. Iii. IV.

VI.

iI. TI. Iv.

I. II. Ill. Iv.

VI. _ Vil.

THE PLACE OF BIRTH ° . . HIS PARENTS . . . ° . THE MACDONALD DESCENT . ° 2

e ° °

SHE MACKAY DESCENT . =. 9-5 0 ops Soe hl co. Sie aatipelarcas ie ies peel ira Pi) Si ee at ae THE YOUNG PHILOSOPHER eee ee we penn PORT. OY ey

THE DISCIPLE s . . . . . ° .

BOOK II THE LOVER

THE WOOL-WORK SLIPPERS . . . . . THE FAMILY OF JAMES POWELL . . >. . EU NEW OUTLOOK Si ge ae lia PREUORERE ee te et ee ew gt NEW FRIENDS AND DUTIES . . . . . PAPER AMO BONS ce! oe ei ee ws

BOOK III

CALLED AND REJECTED

THE CALL TO ARUNDEL . ° ° e ° .

MARRIAGE . ° . ° ° * ° . ° THE PASTOR . ° ° ° ° ° . ° THE THREE BROTHERS . ° ° ° ; . THE HERESY HUNT . . ° . ° e ° BOOK IV MANCHESTER ALEXANDER JOHN SCOTT . ° ° ° . > THE WILDERNESS ° ° . . 5 ° . A HOME AGAIN . . : . . ° . . THE PREACHING ROOM IN RENSHAW STREET ° WITHIN AND WITHOUT . . e ° ° ° THE PAINTED TABLE . . ° ° ° ° °

LOOKING AT DEATH . ° ° ° ° ° e

“4

PAGE

19 25 38 46 51 67 74 83

91 96 107 110 118 129

135 143 154 160 177

191 196 206 212 220 228 241

6 GEORGE MACDONALD

BOOK V ako MIGRATIONS I. KINGSWEAR AND HUNTLY ° ° ° ° ° . II, ALGIERS e e . ° e ° ° ° ° ° BOOK VI

HASTINGS I. THE TACKLEWAY a . ° ° ° . e ° Il. ADESTE FIDELES . . . . . . ° Ill. FATHER AND BROTHER FALL ASLEEP ° . e . IV. PHANTASTES, ° ° . ° . . . . . vV. LADY BYRON e ° ° ° ° ° ° . °

BOOK VII

THE NOVELIST

I. DAVID ELGINBROD ° . . . . ° . ° II. JOHN RUSKIN ° ° . . . . . . . III. LEWIS CARROLL . ° . . ° . ° ° . IV. SWITZERLAND ° ° . . ° ° ° ° ° Vv. THE EDINBURGH CHAIR . . . : . . . VI. BUDE . . ° . . . . ° . ° VII. VERBAL INSPIRATION . . . . . ° ° e VIII. THE RETREAT ° . . . . . . ° e IX. THE BLUE BELL. . . ° * ° ° ° . X. FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE ° ° ° ° °

BOOK VIII

AMERICA

I. THE INVITATION . e ° ° e . . ° ° II. THE RECEPTION , e . . . ° . ° .

iat. New Pers OS GS Bi ae IV. WAREWELL «6 pycyyein te seas peop pe eRe Se hs Ble BOOK IX THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW I, PALAZZO CATTANEO (05°. 2. anastasia Il. PORTO FINO a cee Mey tad, he) ey BOOK X CORAGGIO 1, MRS GRRATHRART ae ak ee eo es Il, THE PASSING OF CHRISTIANA. . . . . . Ii. &: SERAP OF taprrema sa aS ey BY RAR WORDEN Bo SR Ee a os ak V. THE LONG VIGIL Sap ar GA ANE a RNa TENN BIBLIOGHAPHY 324 ek ee) QR

INDEX . ° ° ° ° ° ° . ° . °

PAGE 259 266

277 285 290 294 300

317 328 3842 347 353 359 371 379 389 397

409 419 437

450

465 483

501 516 528 537 546

563 567

ILLUSTRATIONS

GEORGE MACDONALD (1892) Frontispiece TO FACE PAGE

GEORGE MACDONALD’S FATHER AND MOTHER SR) Sees, Pee HIS FATHER AND GRANDMOTHER RS, Sahu east es wba an ee MISS CHARLOTTE POWELL AND MRS. ALEXANDER POWELL .

JAMES POWELL AND MRS. JAMES POWELL ear, tN

GEORGE MACDONALD AND HIS WIFE (1855) eee ORD ALEXANDER AND JOHN HILL MACDONALD SRapees | eee BRONZE MEDALLION OF GEORGE MACDONALD (1858) . . . GEGRGE“MACDONALD (1862) owsioe se sak es es Sa ees MRS. GEORGE MACDONALD, HER FAMILY AND LEWIS CARROLL . GROUP OF CONTEMPORARY WRITERS E en ne Ge as THE RETREAT, HAMMERSMITH . 9s. 303 es

GEORGE MACDONALD AND RICHARD WATSON GILDER (1873)

FAMILY OF GEORGE MACDONALD (1876) . . . Pac eet BIG ROOM AT CASA CORAGGIO . «1 ee ele

GEORGE MACDONALD (1884) . . . - «© 4 4s es LILIA SCOTT MACDONALD AS CHRISTIANA. . «© «© «© + GEORGE MACDONALD (1880) AND HIS WIFE (1885)... .- THE GOLDEN WEDDING . . - «© «© © «© *#© © *

GEORGE MACDONALD’S BOOK-PLATE AFTER WILLIAM BLAKE

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INTRODUCTION

ERTAIN magazines have symposiums (I will call them “ symposia” if I am allowed to call the

two separate South Kensington collections ** musea ’’) in which persons are asked to name “ Books that Have Influenced Me,” on the lines of ‘‘ Hymns that Have Helped Me.” It is not a very realistic process as a rule, for our minds are mostly a vast uncatalogued library; and for a man to be photo- graphed with one of the books in his hand generally means at best that he has chosen at random, and at worst that he is posing for effect. But in a certain rather special sense I for one can really testify to a book that has made a difference to my whole existence, which helped me to see things in a certain way from the start; a vision of things which even so real a revolution as a change of religious allegiance has sub- stantially only crowned and confirmed. Of all the stories I have read, including even all the novels of the same novelist, it remains the most real, the most realistic, in the exact sense of the phrase the most like life. It is called The Princess and the Goblin, and is by George MacDonald, the man who is the subject of this book. When I say it is like life, what I mean is this. It describes a. little princess living in a castle in the mountains which is perpetually undermined, so to speak, by subterranean demons who sometimes come up through the cellars. She climbs up the castle stairways to the nursery or the other rooms; _ but now and again the stairs do not lead to the usual landings, but to a new room she has;never seen before, and cannot generally find Again. Here a good great-

10 GEORGE MACDONALD

grandmother, who is a sort of fairy godmother, is perpetually spinning and speaking words of under- standing and encouragement. When I read it as a child, I felt that the whole thing was happening inside a real human house, not essentially unlike the house I was living in, which also had staircases and rooms and cellars. This is where the fairy-tale differed from many other fairy-tales; above all, this is where the philosophy differed from many other philosophies. I have always felt a certain insufficiency about the ideal of Progress, even of the best sort which is a Pilgrim’s Progress. It hardly suggests how near both the best and the worst things are to us from the first ; even perhaps especially at the first. And though like every other sane person I value and revere the ordinary fairy-tale of the miller’s third son who set out to seek his fortune (a form which MacDonald himself followed in the sequel called The Princess and Curdie), the very suggestion of travelling to a far-off fairyland, which is the soul of it, prevents it from achieving this particular purpose of making all the ordinary staircases and doors and windows into magical things.

Dr. Greville MacDonald, in his intensely interesting memoir of his father which follows, has I think mentioned somewhere his sense of the strange symbolism of stairs. Another recurrent image in his romances was a great white horse; the father of the princess had one, and there was another in The Back of the North Wind. To this day I can never see a big white horse in the street without a sudden sense of indescribable things. But for the moment I am speaking of what may emphatically be called the presence of household gods —and household goblins. And the picture of life in this parable in not only truer than the image of a journey like that of the Pilgrim’s Progress, it is even truer than the mere image of a siege like that of The Holy War. There is something not only imaginative but intimately true about the idea of the goblins being below the house and capable of besieging it from the

INTRODUCTION 11

cellars. When the evil things besieging us do appear, they do not appear outside but inside. Anyhow, that simple image of a house that is our home, that is rightly loved as our home, but of which we hardly know the best or the worst, and must always wait for the one and watch against the other, has always remained in my mind as something singularly solid and unanswerable; and was more corroborated than corrected when I came to give a more definite name to the lady watching over us from the turret, and perhaps to take a more practical view of the goblins under the floor. Since I first read that story some five alternative philosophies of the universe have come to our colleges out of Germany, blowing through the world like the east wind. But for me that castle is still standing in the mountains and the light in its tower is not put out.

All George MacDonald’s other stories, interesting and suggestive in their several ways, seem to be illustrations and even disguises of that one. I say disguises, for this is the very important difference between his sort of mystery and mere allegory. The commonplace allegory takes what it regards as the commonplaces or conventions necessary to ordinary men and women, and tries to make them pleasant or picturesque by dressing them up as princesses or goblins or good fairies. But George MacDonald did really believe that people were princesses and goblins and good fairies, and he dressed them up as ordinary men and women. The fairy-tale was the inside of the ordinary story and not the outside. One result of this is that all the inanimate objects that are the stage properties of the story retain that nameless glamour which they have in a literal fairy-tale. The staircase in Robert Falconer is as much of a magic ladder as the staircase in the Princess and the Goblin; and when the boys are making the boat and the girl is reciting verses to them, in Alec Forbes, and some old gentleman says playfully that it will rise to song like

12 GEORGE MACDONALD

a magic Scandinavian ship, it always seemed to me as if he were describing the reality, apart from the appearance, of the incident. The novels as novels are uneven, but as fairy-tales they are extraordinarily consistent. He never for a moment loses his own inner thread that runs through the patchwork, and it is the thread that the fairy great-grandmother put into the hands of Curdie to guide him out of the mazes of the goblins.

The originality of George MacDonald has also a his- ~ torical significance, which perhaps can best be estimated by comparing him with his great countryman Carlyle. It is a measure of the very real power and even popularity of Puritanism in Scotland that Carlyle never lost the Puritan mood even when he lost the whole of the Puritan theology. If an escape from the bias of environ- ment be the test of originality, Carlyle never completely escaped, and George MacDonald did. He evolved out of his own mystical meditations a complete alternative theology leading to a completely contrary mood. And in those mystical meditations he learned secrets far beyond the mere extension of Puritan indignation to ethics and politics. For in the real genius of Carlyle there was a touch of the bully, and wherever there is an element of bullying there is an element of platitude, of reiteration and repeated orders. Carlyle could never have said anything so subtle and simple as MacDonald’s saying that God is easy to please and hard to satisfy. Carlyle was too obviously occupied with insisting that God was hard to satisfy ; just as some optimists are doubtless too much occupied with insisting that He is easy to please. In other words, MacDonald had made for himself a sort of spiritual environment, a space and transparency of mystical light, which was quite exceptional in his national and denominational environment. He said things that were like the Cavalier mystics, like the Catholic saints, sometimes perhaps like the Platonists or the Swedenborgians, but not in the least like the Calvinists, even as Calvinism remained

INTRODUCTION 13

in a man like Carlyle. And when he comes to be more carefully studied as a mystic, as I think he will be when people discover the possibiltiy of collecting jewels scattered in a rather irregular setting, it will be found, I fancy, that he stands for a rather important turning-point in the history of Christendom, as repre- senting the particular Christian nation of the Scots. As Protestants speak of the morning stars of the Reformation, we may be allowed to note such names here and there as morning stars of the Reunion.

The spiritual colour of Scotland, like the local colour of so many Scottish moors, is a purple that in some lights can look like grey. The national character is in reality intensely romantic and passionate—indeed, excessively and dangerously romantic and passionate. Its emotional torrent has only too often been turned towards revenge, or lust, or cruelty, or witchcraft. There is no drunkenness like Scotch drunkenness; it has in it the ancient shriek and the wild shrillness of the Meenads on the mountains. And of course it is equally true on the good side, as in the great literature of the nation. Stopford Brooke and other critics have truly pointed out that a vivid sense of colour appears in the medieval Scottish poets before it really appears in any English poets. And it is absurd to be talking of the hard and shrewd sobriety of a national type that has made itself best known throughout the modern world by the prosaic literalism of Treasure Island and the humdrum realism of Peter Pan. Nevertheless, by a queer historical accident this vivid and coloured people have been forced to “ wear their blacks” in a sort of endless funeral on an eternal Sabbath. In most plays and pictures, however, in which they are represented as wearing their blacks, some instinct makes the actor or the artist see that they fit very badly. And so they do.

The passionate and poetical Scots ought obviously, like the passionate and poetical Italians, to have had a religion which competed with the beauty and vividness

14 GEORGE MACDONALD

of the passions, which did not let the devil have all the bright colours, which fought glory with glory and flame with flame. It should have balanced Leonardo with St. Francis; no young and lively person really thinks he can be balanced with John Knox. The consequence was that this power in Scottish letters, especially in the day (or night) of complete Calvinistic orthodoxy, was weakened and wasted in a hundred ways. In Burns it was driven out of its due course like a madness; in Scott it was only tolerated as a memory. Scott could only be a medievalist by becoming what he would call an antiquary, or what we should call an xsthete. He had to pretend his love was dead, that he might be allowed to love her. As Nicodemus came to Jesus by night, the zsthete only comes to church by moonlight.

Now, among the many men of genius Scotland pro- duced in the nineteenth century, there was only one so original as to go back to this origin. There was only one who really represented what Scottish religion should have been, if it had continued the colour of the Scottish medizval poetry. In his particular type of literary work he did indeed realize the apparent paradox of a St. Francis of Aberdeen, seeing the same sort of halo round every flower and bird. It is not the same thing as any poet’s appreciation of the beauty of the flower or bird. A heathen can feel that and remain heathen, or in other words remain sad. It is a certain special sense of significance, which the tradition that most values it calls sacramental. To have got back to it, or forward to it, at one bound of boyhood, out of the black Sabbath of a Calvinist town, was a miracle of imagination.

In noting that he may well have this place in history in the sense of religious and of national history, I make no attempt here to fix his place in literature. He is in any case one of the kind that it is most difficult to fix. He wrote nothing empty; but he wrote much that is rather too full, and of which the appreciation

INTRODUCTION 15

depends rather on a sympathy with the substance than on the first sight of the form. As a matter of fact, the mystics have not often been men of letters in the finished and almost professional sense. A thoughtful. man will now find more to think about in Vaughan or Crashaw than in Milton, but he will also find more to criticize; and nobody need deny that in the ordinary sense a casual reader may wish there was less of Blake and more of Keats. But even this allowance must not be exaggerated; and it is in exactly the same sense in which we pity a man who has missed the whole of Keats or Milton, that we can feel compassion for the critic who has not walked in the forest of Phantastes or made the acquaintance of Mr. Cupples in the adventures of Alec Forbes.

G. K. CHESTERTON.

Ls es Tht a tea

fbi gle ata his

BOOK I BOYHOOD AND YOUTH

Fi ae

Ms aw

CHAPTER I THE PLACE OF BIRTH

in Aberdeenshire on December 10, 1824.

“The Little Grey Town,” a name conforming rather with its terrible winters than its richly flowered summers, lies in the valley of the Bogie River, with a wide circle of hills standing around.

In the centre of its market-place, with thatched well-house at one end, gabled merchants’ dwellings and stores around, and toll-booth, or jail, at the other, stood the famous “ Stannin’ Stanes of Strathbogie,”’ whither in older days the people were summoned by the Fiery Cross to battle. Yet constant raids and risings, punitive massacres and disastrous loyalty to chief or king—together with, later, the terrors of John Knox’s Calvinism, longer withstood here than in the South—sobered at last the Highlander’s semi-barbarous freedom and compelled him to that sobriety of thought which is one characteristic of Strathbogie’s sons, and indeed of all Aberdeenshire; which, few dare dis- pute, has more brains to the square mile than any other northern county. Porridge and milk—for the poor skimmed to the blue, or sour—had supplanted

(5°.2" MACDONALD was born at Huntly

1 Theoriginal title of Alec Forbes of Howglen, which publishers rejected as not conforming with the then fashionable nomenclature in Fiction. The town that had sprung up around the old Huntly Castle was originally known as the Raws of Strathbogie, that name including the valley watered by the Bogie and the surrounding country. The lordship of Strathbogie had been granted in 1318 by Robert Bruce to Sir Adam Gordon after Bannockburn: a border laird, he took with him to the North the name Huntly, belonging to a village on or property in Berwickshire.

20 GEORGE MACDONALD

game got by bow and gun, or beef by marauding. But though oatmeal and John Knox had changed the morals of Ossian and the religion of Rome, they could not spoil the people’s courage and devotion.

The ancient River of Romance runs through the town silently for most part, but at times, as if in sympathy with the rebel blood in every true Celt’s veins, defies its banks, flooding and even wrecking a homestead here and there.

The River Bogie flows east of the town to join the fuller, peat-gold Deveron beyond the stately ruin of Huntly Castle. Both rivers come from poetic sources. The Bogie’s contributory, Burn of Craig, rushes from storm-swept flanks of The Buck—the “old Cabrach King ’ 1—through the rich-timbered, gloomy Den of Craig, with its battle-scarred castle aloft, its kelpies below in unfathomed pools, to join the Burn of Glennie. Thence loitering in still deeps, curling over flat green rocks or leaping into cascade, it joins the open Deveron, which, topaz-stained from the wind- swept peat-mosses around The Buck, swirls round the foothold of Huntly Castle.

The mystic beauty and fury of these waters had no small share in inspiring the lads of Strathbogie to their fearsome sports; and they fostered a passion for adventure in the world, and memories of the old home with its dear, if terrible, religion. Romance never dies in the Celt ; and even in the lowland Scot, though his intellect, his success, his science may strangle his ancient faith, his imagination never quite gives up the ghost.

In spite of the Gordons’ personal treacheries, scandals such as that related of ‘‘ Lord Rothie” in Robert Falconer, and historic cruelties—witness the feeding of two hundred orphans of their butchered enemies in Huntly Castle from pig troughs 2—they were in some sort popular if also feared: ‘ Ne’er

1 Cabrach =a stag.

2 Related by Sir Walter Scott in Tales of a Grandfather, and by G MacDonald in Alec Forbes, vol. ii, p. 181. y ieee

~

THE PLACE OF BIRTH 21

misca’ a Gordon in the Raws of Strathbogie” is a grim local proverb. But when, after the first Duke had surrendered Edinburgh Castle to the Orange troops (1688), and the Gordons were excluded from the Court and all public service, they devoted themselves to the prosperity of their people and the development of handicrafts. And almost within living memory a creditable story used to be told of Alexander, the fourth Duke. At the farm-letting, just three years before George MacDonald’s birth, the Duke’s factor proposed breaking up several small holdings and adding them to the larger farms: ‘‘ What are you to do with the cottars?”’ asked the Duke. “They will seek a living elsewhere,” said the factor. The Duke postponed his decision till he had lunched, and then declared he would have all the people taken to the Deveron and drowned. ‘‘Oh, you joke, your Grace!” was the reply of the factor. ‘No, Mr. , said the Duke; ‘“‘if we are to deprive them of the means of living, this would be the most humane course. No, Mr. ; they or their forbears were here before us, and they will be here after I am gone. They will retain their holdings.’”’ 1 But the Duke died five years later: George MacDonald remembered watching the funeral cortége as a little two-year-old child. Then the factor had his way. So that the frugal and hardy crofters that once had been freely scattered over the glens of Strathbogie and furnished fearless fighters for chief and faith, rapidly disappeared. That the life and character of such crofters made deep impression upon the young George, his books reveal.

The life of Huntly centred in the Square. Its prosperity still depended upon agriculture and handi- crafts, and machinery had not yet enslaved the poor

to build an empire; indeed, George MacDonald’s life

ran contemporaneously with the greater part of the

industrial revolution, and all the changes in life and

manners, wealth and poverty, knowledge and labour- 1 Told by George Gray in Recollections of Huntly, Banff, 1892.

22 GEORGE MACDONALD.

saving, thereby introduced. The houses of Huntly were two-storied and slated, except the inn and some others that were gabled and thatched. Many of them had their ground-floors sunk for weaving shops—such as one sees still remaining in Bolton, Lancashire. The number of looms must have been very large—many for linen, the MacDonald factory perhaps providing the thread, though the greater part of its output, so it is said, was exported to South America. The culti- vation and manufacture of flax—or lint, as it was called—was also an important industry, and the land- scape was brightened by patches of sky-blue flax un- dulating in the wind. Spinning of fine woollen yarn also, for which Huntly was famed, was universal in the cottages around. Indeed, every home had its one or two wheels, many of beautiful workmanship, and the spinsters earned better wages than by any other indoor work.

The busy “‘Squar’’” must have been a prettier sight in 1824 than now. Around the well, with its canopy roof, pulley, chain and bucket, gathered the country women in grey cloak and white mutches, and the bare-headed maids, all with baskets on their arms with butter, eggs, cheese and live fowls. Mingling with them were the town women and domestic ser- vants, their haggling and chaffering silenced only when the “ Customer” appeared to collect the statutory “Custom pence.” Everything was taxed in those days. Since the disarming Act of 174’7—which forbade all kilts and tartans—knee-breeches and tailed coats of hodden grey, with Glengarry bonnets, were the > common dress of the men.

On market days there were stalls for all manner of produce, sweeties, shoes, haberdashery, etc. But one more important article was the candle-fir, thin slips of the resinous bog-fir, from one to two feet long, which were either laid on the great hearth with its peat-fire, or fixed in a sort of candlestick called the ~ puw-man or puir-page (beggar or beggar-boy)—a block

9

‘THE PLACE OF BIRTH 23

of stone with a hole in the centre into which was fixed a wooden upright three feet high with a piece of cleft iron a-top into which the resinous candle was fixed.? Side by side in the market-place would stand a score or so of little carts, of the most primitive make, loaded with the bog-fir for candles. Some had also bags of moss-berries (cranberries) or of aitnachs.2 The small, shaggy, long-tailed horses were hitched with hair-ropes to the carts. Behind one of the carts one might watch a group of town nickums, keenly on the look- out for opportunity to pluck hairs from the horses’ tails. Fishing-gut not being available, such hairs more than repaid the risk of flying hoof or the fierce maledic- tions of Gaelic dealers; and both Bogie and Deveron with their trout were free to all fishers.

The mere mention of peat-fire and fir-candle carries one’s imagination beyond the town into the small farmer’s home. On each side the hearth are father and mother, with a luckieminnie (granny) or luckiedad most likely, the little ones and a servant or two round about. A quarterer, too, a news-vending beggar, might be enjoying his periodic welcome, and in exchange tinkering broken vessels, or treating rheumatic joints, or charming away the warts. There would be singing of songs and ballads, story-tellings too of fairy and Kelpie, witch and ‘‘ Auld Nickie Ben.” The women will be spinning, or weaving mittens with the cleek (crotchet), the men cleavin’ can’les, or whittling harrow- iynds (teeth), or perhaps cobbling brogues. But if the children are not yet abed, there will be silence while they get their lessons. Hospitalities were free and frequent, and young women would bring their wheels on their backs, their arms full of carded wool or

1 Tallow candles were heavily taxed and too expensive for daily use except in the richer homes. The fir was brought from the peat-bogs of Abernethy in Invernesshire, a distance of thirty or forty miles, renowned for its industry of cleavin’ can’les. The fir-candle is mentioned in Castle Warlock, vol. iii, p. 267.

2 Juniper berries used to flavour beer. In the Highlands juniper sprays took the place of rushes for floor-covering and added sweetness to the peaty atmosphere.

24 GEORGE MACDONALD

lint, when the cottar and his wifie were giein’ a forenicht.

George MacDonald’s writings are redolent of these simple ways. With crofters, their religion and wisdom, their poverty and hospitalities, no less than with lairds, tacksmen and farmers, he was intimate; while we need but cite his love of the spinning-wheel—that peaceful tool of the hand, full of music and mystery— to realize how inseparable were the bygone crafts from his poetic imagination.

\ . é AY - ’ 9 Fi 4 ‘ w . s ekg, ; ae ae} . ’ ne oer ne eld l a ' ’ ’ * au ; Sayab

: ‘ ait “~ Pp : ; ye ’ r os 4 if a Ph or ic

Li ya eae ho oN ee Sy

GEORGE MACDONALD, SENR., 1822

GEORGE MACDONALD, SENR. MRS. CHARLES EDWARD MACDONALD, GEORGE MACDONALD’S GRAND-

MOTHER

CHAPTER II HIS PARENTS

father of George MacDonald, was born

in January 1746, three months before the Culloden tragedy. He was educated at Fordyce, in Banffshire, whose school even then was famed for the scholars it produced. The Gaelic was his father’s tongue and Romanism his religion. But many High- landers turned Protestant after Culloden—whether for their bodies’ or their souls’ safety. The youngest of a large family, Charles Edward was apprenticed to the weaving business, but gave it up when he was offered a clerkship in the firm of McVeagh Brothers, owners of the largest bleach-fields in Huntly. He was taken into partnership and soon succeeded to the business, adding to it a thread or gimp-spinning industry. He built the factory described in Robert Falconer, where the machinery was still driven by hand-power, and was probably but little modified from Hargreaves’ original spinning-jenny.!

In 1821 the Duke of Gordon granted a lease of Upper Pirriesmill, known as The Farm, to Charles Edward’s three sons, who had to reclaim a large half of it, then a dry “scaup.”? It was this farm*® in which

1 Patented in 1764, soon to be amplified by Arkwright in 1769, when first horse-power, then water, robbed the hand of its ancient rights.

2 They were the first to introduce bones for manure and subsoil plough- ing: they offered a penny a pound for all bones brought to them, and for many months men, women and children would crowd the place with their collections of bones lying about the country generally. The bones were crushed and sold to the farmers.

3 The ‘‘ Howglen” of Alec Forbes. It is now in the hands of Mr. Robert C. Troup, the grandson of my father’s uncle, James MacDonald.

26

Coe EDWARD MACDONALD, the grand-

a

26 GEORGE MACDONALD

George MacDonald spent his boyhood. Natural advantages fitted it admirably for bleaching-fields, its sunny, close-mown meadow running beside the River Bogie’s soft waters, which became renowned far and wide for their bleaching properties. ‘“‘ The wind gave life to everything. It rippled the stream, and

fluttered the long webs bleaching in the sun: they

rose and fell like white waves on the bright green lake; and women, homely Nereids of the grassy sea, were besprinkling them with spray. There were dull sounds of wooden machinery near, but they made no discord with the sweetness of the hour.” +

Dairy farming, moreover, became an adjunct to sun’s and river’s services. For in the days prior to the discovery that sulphuric acid was a cheaper and equally efficient substitute for lactic acid, whey was an absolute necessity. When this waste of milk was no longer profitabie, the cows were retained for more normal uses.

Here I must write fully about George MacDonald’s grandmother, if only because her passion for saving souls from the eternal burning was reproduced in him with a zeal no less urgent that it had other inter- pretation. She was Isabella Robertson of Huntly. The grandmother in Robert Falconer was recognized, by all who remembered the old lady, as a wonderful portrait of her,? many of old Mrs. Falconer’s words being actual utterances. She was born in 1756, the daughter of a linen-weaver. She was married on December 10, 1778, to Charles Edward MacDonald. Her father would not allow his daughters to learn writing “lest they should be writing to the lads.” But she taught herself penmanship after she was sixty, and a letter of hers with portions of her diary lie before me. There were four sons and five daughters, though only one of the latter survived, she marrying the Rev. James Spence. The eldest son William

1 Donal Grant, vol. i, p. 111. * Vide Robert Falconer, vol. i, p. 62.

J

HIS PARENTS 27

converted certain disused bleach-works on the west side of the Bogie into a brewery and prospered. He was twelve years older than George (my father’s father), who was followed by Charles and James. These three sons inherited the business, though Charles, pre- sumably the favourite, got the bulk of the property, and so assumed the position of senior partner in the firm.

Charles Edward MacDonald, Isabella Robertson’s husband, added a bank-agency to his business and became an elder in the Parish Church of Huntly. But because of the minister’s inefficiency—the whole of Strathbogie being called “The Dead Sea’”’—his wife betook herself to the Missionar Kirk, whose minister’s zeal and eloquence spread far and wide. She took her family with her, making some of them eager Missionars. So strong indeed became the evangelical movement, even in the Established Church, that the “* Strathbogie controversy’ on the question of Church patronage was the immediate occasion for the disruption of 1843, which ended in the formation of the Free Church. Soldiers, it is still remembered, were sent to Huntly to maintain the parish ministers in their pulpits.

But the good lady, though stuff of the old Cove- nanting martyrs; had as fine an instinct for the righteous care of the valuables deposited with her husband, the banker—so he was called—as she had for the salvation of souls. For this responsible func- tion, Charles Edward MacDonald received a salary of £20 per annum, and this remuneration was to cover rent, taxes and all risk of bad debts. The rent, how- ever, involved no additional outlay; for at the same counter at which orders for goods to be bleached were received, the firm handled their banking business. But money was scarce in those days, and the bank had not even a safe until Mrs. Charles Edward appropriated to this use the family Chanter Kist, the traditional receptacle of family records—which records, while the family were still Catholics, would be found

28 GEORGE MACDONALD

in no parochial registers—and destroyed all these as snares and wiles of Satan.

Mrs. Charles Edward was as benevolent as she was a fine business woman. She adopted a family of four beggar children of questionable parentage and placed three of them out in the world. One became a prosperous merchant in Aberdeen; the second went to Jamaica; a third enlisted and soon died. She subscribed to the London City Mission, and was the inspiration of the Huntly temperance movement. Her antagonism to Roman Catholics was of course intense, although she always entertained the gentlest hopes for individuals misled by the ‘‘ Scarlet Woman.” My eldest uncle used to tell of a visit he once paid her shortly before she died in 1848 at the age of ninety-two. She could still with her strong glasses read large type in spite of her short sight. The newspapers that year were full of revolutions and the trembling of thrones. ‘“* Laddie,” she said, ‘‘the newspaper is telling that amang a’ the changes takin’ place i’ the warld, they have gotten a guid Pope at Rome; an’ I have been prayin’ to the Lord a’ nicht to gie him a new hert an’ a guid wife!”

But Charles, who was solely responsible for the bank business, fell into difficulties, his kindness of heart and optimism, his desire to play the patron among friends with whom he was so popular, men and women alike, encouraging his lack of conscience. He advanced money to irresponsible customers and him- self became responsible, and was soon involved in transactions which, but for a legal flaw in the indict- ment, would have landed him in prison. He fled to America. The bleaching business in which he was

1 The chanter-kist or treasure chest was an important item in every Highland household, whether of chief or clansman, laird or crofter. It was a huge, carved-oak coffer; and besides the pipes’ black chanter and mouldy old papers, it might hold a family brooch—a glimmering cairn- gorm with lesser garnets, amethysts and topazes set round in high relief— and also, very commonly, a divining crystal, or in Catholic districts a rosary, and perhaps even a sacred relic. —

HIS PARENTS 29

a partner was held responsible for his debts—those to the bank being near £6,000—a huge sum in those days; and the two brothers, George MacDonald’s father and uncle, paid them in full, though they had no part in the bank’s affairs. The burden of the annual repayments lay heavy upon them all through their lives.

It was over the backslidings of this her son Charles that his mother nigh broke her heart. The occasion of his unexpected return one Sunday afternoon in July 1835, recorded in the old lady’s diary and wit- nessed by her grandson George, who had conducted her home from the Kirk, is described in the opening chapter of Robert Falconer. The burning of his violin, as given in the novel, was also a fact.2 She was determined it should lead no other lads beyond reach of the Divine Grace. We cannot but guess that the splendid old woman—* with a volcanic heart of love, her outside was always so still and cold ’ 3—would have wept bitter tears, had she known how largely responsible she was destined to be for her little grandson’s future renown as a novelist. .

In spite of the two remaining brothers’ indefatigable enterprise, the business was more than once almost overwhelmed in disaster. Glasgow spinning-mills made

1 In one of my grandfather’s letters to my father he refers to the great burdens put upon him in his old age. He had, in addition to his brother’s debts, taken upon him the responsibilities of one who is best unnamed. When my great uncle James, my grandfather having predeceased him, died, he bequeathed a great part of his small property to the Bank, the sum representing money due from his brother Charles; and, after some hesitation, the Bank refused it.- Nor, when Charles died in New York in 1836, age forty-one, had it claimed the sum for which he had insured his life, and which was duly paid to his widow in Aberdeen—this fact being the only intimation she ever received of his death.

2 In the Island of Lewis the ministers of the Secession Church had compelled the destruction of pipes and fiddles. ‘‘ If there was a foolish man here and there who demurred, the good ministers and the good elders themselves broke and burnt their instruments, saying :

* Better is the small fire that warms on the little day of peace Than the big fire that burns on the great day of wrath.’”’

(Carmina Gadelica, by Alexander Carmichael, 1900, vol. i, p. 26.) 3 Robert Falconer, vol. i, p. 293.

.

30 GEORGE MACDONALD

the factory unprofitable. Then, thanks to the inven- tion of chloride of lime by Charles MacIntosh, F.R.S., the great Glasgow chemist, and cousin of my grand- mother, Mrs. George MacDonald senior, the bleaching was no longer in demand. Lastly, they started the manufacture of potato-flour and starch.1 Here the water-mill again did the work, mashing the potatoes and separating the rind, which was used to make a dressing for coarse canvas bags. But this was in its turn ruined by the three successive years of the potato- blight, 1846, 1847, and 1848, which caused terrible suffering in the Highlands, and which Dr. MacIntosh MacKay, minister of Dunoon and brother to my grand- mother, worked so strenuously to alleviate. Thereafter the water-mill, no longer used for washing the fabrics sent to them for bleaching, or for mashing potatoes, must turn millstones to grind oats, and this became their principal business.

George MacDonald senior married Helen MacKay in 1822. Of her parentage and relatives more will be told presently. He had built the house in which his two eldest sons were born, Charles in 1823 and George, the future poet and novelist, in 1824. This house was situated in Duke Street, but has long since been con- verted into two shops. The grandmother lived in the adjoining house, at the corner of Church Street and Duke Street—the house in fact described in the novel as Robert Falconer’s home;? and only the garden separated it from the factory.

My grandfather was “ as fine a man,” so they used to say, “as might be seen in four parishes,” of noble presence, well built and robust—a “‘wyss”’ (wise) man,

1 It was advertised as ‘‘ Farina, a substitute for arrowroot and suitable for invalids and children’s diet ’°—the fact being endorsed by the renowned Sir John Sinclair of Ulbster, the first President of the Board of Agriculture.

2 The late Rev. Robert Troup, who married Margaret MacDonald, daughter of my father’s uncle James, related that latterly during the rebuilding of a part of the grandmother’s house to make a shop of it, the door by which Robert Falconer found his way into Mary St. John’s house was exposed. It opened by a few steps from the first floor, and had originally been the communication for the two families between the adjoining houses.

HIS PARENTS 31

moreover, to quote the vernacular. He was brave, patient, and generous; finely humorous, of strong literary tastes and profound religious convictions. My father’s reverence for him was absolute, one transcendent hope being to meet him again. The character of David Elginbrod was drawn from him, the relation of this father to his daughter corresponding with his father’s to himself. He rarely caressed his boys: it was not the fashion in those days to do so. Nor could he make up to them for the loss of their mother, though as they grew older he won a perfect intimacy with at least his son George. We realize this in the latter’s dedication to him of his first volume of Poems (1857) :

Thou hast been faithful to my highest need : And I, thy debtor, ever, evermore,

Shall never feel the grateful burden sore. Yet most I thank thee, not for any deed, But for the sense thy living self did breed That fatherhood is at the world’s great core.

Of Helen MacKay we know but little beyond what we may gather from a simple miniature done imme- diately after her marriage, and her son’s adoration of her memory. My step-grandmother once told me that she had been her dearest friend, and that she and her husband were the most beautiful woman and man she had ever beheld. Like all her many brothers and sisters, she was well educated and had good brains. Her brother, MacIntosh MacKay, LL.D., was the greatest Gaelic scholar of the day and a friend of Sir Walter Scott, who expressed himself as much indebted to him.! My father had little to tell us of her, for she died when he was eight years old of the tuberculous disease which had invalided her for as long as he could remember. Her love for her boys need not be spoken of; yet I cannot refrain from quoting the one letter | of hers my father had cherished. It personifies this

1 Vide note to The Two Drovers, vol. 41 of the Waverley Novels.

32 GEORGE MACDONALD

love and introduces to the world her infant George in such wise that already we perceive some real heroism in his facing of adversity. The letter is written from Huntly to her mother-in-law, then in Aberdeen. But being undated, it gives no clue to Baby George’s age when he suffered with so much equanimity his mother’s heartless decision.

My pear MorTHeER,

I hope you will not think that my silence till now is the want of sincere and warm affection for you. If you for one moment thought this, I would be very much hurt, for I can assure you it is anything but this. And if I know my own heart I think I can say that nearest to my own mother there is not another I love and esteem more than my second mother—for you have been a mother to me ever since I came with you—and I hope I will ever feel grateful to you for it.

I hope you will not be angry tho’ I do not write a long letter. I am going to tell you something that will show you how little sense I have. Do you know I was almost angry on Saturday when your letter came to my dear G. about weaning our dear little Boy—for I was very unwilling to do it—and I always thought I would have been able to give him three months at least. But O! my heart [was] very sore when I saw that you, my dear husband, and Mrs. Ross— and indeed all the rest—were so earnest about it—that I was forced to begin that very morning. And he has not got anything from me since. But I cannot help my heart being very much grieved for him yet, for he has not forgot it: poor little fellow he is behaving wonderfully well as yet. He cryed desperate a while the first night, but he has cryed very little since and I hope the worst is over now... .1

The cheeses are drying nicely at the farm, but the Lass is very ill off for meat to the hens.? Just if you could put us upon any plan to get meat to them we would be very glad. We are selling very little butter. O I wish you were home again to us. O mind and write me very soon—for I will be no less than proud of aletter from you.

Good evening my ever dear Mother,

I ever am your affectionate daughter, — , HELEN McD.

1 In 1888 an old lady, a Mrs. Mackie, living at Fort Langley, British Columbia, once told Mrs. Julian Peacock, now of Manchester, that she was foster sister of the Baby George, whose mother not being strong enough to support her little son, sent him several times a day to her mother’s cottage to be fed along with her infant self.

2 As every farm-wife will realize, this lack of ‘‘ meat to the hens ” suggests a fine economy in the kitchen.

HIS PARENTS 33

Nearly a century old is this letter with its pretty Highland English. It has lain in my father’s cabinet with its secret nest of drawers, along with a golden brown lock of that mother’s hair and her wedding gift to her husband, a little silver-set seal with his name George engraved on its red stone; together also with little trifles belonging to those of his own children who had followed her to the grave.! ~

When George was two years old the family removed to Upper Pirriesmill, his father and his uncle James having built a little house in which both families lived, though, judging from the above letter, they were already farming there. This sharing of a small dwelling must have been difficult, but was accomplished in great friendliness, thanks largely to the elder’s tact and gentleness of temper. His unselfishness was such that, often in opposition to some hasty and unwise step in business proposed and vehemently defended by Mr. James, he would tactfully substitute in his brother’s mind his own wiser views; only to be adopted and acted upon after a day or two by James, who in that short time had come to look upon them as his own. My step-grandmother told me that her husband would just smile, as if in entire approval, when his brother

1 Folded into the letter are some verses in the same handwriting, but more carefully penned two years approximately before my grand- parents were married. I presume they are original and so transcribe them, though intrinsically they are of no great value:

‘** Gallow Hill, [some dozen miles from Huntly}, 29th May, 1820.

‘* We come, dear Jesus, to thy throne ' To open all our grief ; Now send thy promised mercy down, And grant us quick relief.

“Though Satan rage and flesh rebel, And unbelief arise, We'll wait around his footstool still, For Jesus hears our cries.

“ Alas! but I am very dull this night after parting with my dear sister! O Lord, make me resigned to thy will.—HELEN.”

3

34 GEORGE MACDONALD

got all the credit. So the Scottish proverb, “ Freen’s agree best sindry,” had no meaning at The Farm.

Bleachfield Cottage, as it was named for a while, is as plain as a puritanical taste could design, but sur- rounded with trees. It had so little accommodation, that while it made amity and forbearance essential to the inmates’ happiness, it doubtless fostered the tuber- culous disease which destroyed so many of them. It is preserved as much as possible in its original form by my cousin, Robert G. Troup.t Box-beds, each entirely enclosed by panelling and door, were built along the wall of more than one sitting-room. Young George slept in an attic with a skylight, from which I think it was either himself or his brother John who set his kite free in token of ended boyhood, as he describes Robert Falconer doing.

In this place I must put on record certain instances of my grandfather’s fortitude, generosity and humour, although the two latter points—along with his wisdom and piety and touches of austerity proper to the Calvinistic understanding of parental obligation—con- stantly illumine the long series of letters between him and my father until death set the period to it in 1858.

In 1825 my grandfather’s left leg was amputated above the knee for white swelling, as tuberculous disease of the joint was then named, two years previous treatment with blisters and seton having proved unsuc- cessful. My father was told by the doctor who operated —it being before the days of chloroform—how the patient refused the customary stupefying dose of whisky, or even to have his face covered, preferring to watch the operation; and that only for one moment, when the knife first transfixed the flesh, did he turn his face away and ejaculate a faint, sibilant ** whiff !”’

My grandfather was always ready to make fun of

1 Certain guide-books are wholly erroneous in their descriptions of George MacDonald’s home.

HIS PARENTS 35

his loss. He would declare, and in such a way that no little hearers could disbelieve him, that twice every day the Aberdeen coach Defiance and its four horses drove between his legs. My sisters and I had it only from our Uncle Charles, and no questioning could extort any sort of explanation. But at last our mother took pity upon our fear that the obdurate uncle might be deceiving us. The explanation was this, that though our grandfather had his right leg always with him, the other was buried in the graveyard far away on the other side of the high road.

I have little doubt that the racy conversation between Thomas Crann, the dour theological stone- mason in Alee Forbes, and George Macwha, the repro- bate, originated in George MacDonald senior’s delight in making fun of his wooden leg. Macwha is baiting the Calvinist with questions concerning the resurrection of a body with a wooden leg: ‘‘* Wad it be a glorified timmer leg he rose wi’, gin he had been buried wi’ a timmer leg?’ asked he; ‘his ain leg wad be buried some gait.’ ‘Ou, aye, nae doubt. An’ it wad come hoppin’ ower the Paceefic or the Atlantic to jine its oreeginal stump—wad it no?’”

My grandfather’s indifference to mere possessions is illustrated by an incident told me by my father. One day a young Aberdeen friend engaged in business remarked, when visiting at The Farm, that ‘“‘a chap was awkwardly situated in a big city wanting a watch.” Instantly out from his fob came my grandfather’s silver turnip as a free gift to the lad, saying the sun was a better time-keeper in Strathbogie than any merchant’s watch in Aberdeen. Thereafter my grand- father never carried or possessed a watch.

But more important is the story told I believe to this day of the way my grandfather used his wooden leg to save Huntly from a riot.

On April 8, 1846, the youngest of his daughters was born, and her mother’s state had been giving some anxiety. No sooner was she out of danger and ~

36 GEORGE MACDONALD

at last getting some sleep, than a breathless messenger arrived at the cottage, saying that the town was in an uproar and its worst elements coming up to The Farm in a dangerously angry mood, intending to burn, right before the cottage, my grandfather’s effigy. For this was towards the end of the worst year of the three years’ potato famine, and an evil report, that Messrs. George and James MacDonald were holding a store of grain until prices had risen even higher than they were, had been fermenting. My grandfather had just taken off his artificial leg and set it beside the fire, as was his wont when tired. He quickly replaced it and hurried down to stop their entry into the garden.

They were so much taken aback that their anger was immediately silenced. He told them that absolute quiet was essential if his wife was to win through, and he begged them to go down to the market and tell him there what the trouble was all about. Without one word of protest, they departed somewhat shame- facedly, carrying the effigy with them.

By the time my grandfather reached them in the market-place, however, they were joined by others and their anger revived. They built a bonfire alongside the Stannin’ Stanes, with the clumsy effigy sprawling on top, its wooden leg ridiculously in evidence. When at last they were ready to kindle the faggots and my grandfather appeared in his usual blue swallow-tail coat with gilt buttons, black and white check trousers, and soft loose collar, the crowd burst into indignant rage. Quite unperturbed, however, he began to address them, and their hootings were instantly stilled.

** Bide a wee, lads,” he shouted, ‘‘ afore ye set the corp alow (aflame). Ye’ve fastened the timmer-leg to the wrang hurdie (hip).” And leaning on his stick, he gravely added: “Noo, ye’s gang on wi’ yer ploys wi’ a guid conscience, an’ burn yer auld freen’ !”’

Thus were the hungry set laughing and presently cheering the man their hearts knew if their minds misjudged. Then, at his invitation, a few went with

HIS PARENTS 37

him back to The Farm to be convinced that its barn, like their own meal-tubs, was empty.

Such humour could not but endear him to all. When he died in 1858, at the age of sixty-six, the grief was universal. Writing to my mother the day after the funeral, my father, having arrived too late to bid him goodbye, says: “Charles and I went to see some poor people this afternoon. It is very pleasant to hear how they all talk about my father. You would almost fancy he had been a kind of chief of the clan... . I am glad my father has got through. I love him more thanevers

CHAPTER III THE MACDONALD DESCENT

$ URELY it is one of the worst signs of a man to turn his back upon the rock whence he was hewn.’ ! So once wrote George Mac-

Donald regarding his Gaelic origin; and one may add

it would be a poor sign of our love for him if we

thought that rock, grand as it must have been to hold such potentiality in it, unworthy of our regard or unprofitable in helping us to understand him.

That rock was the clan-system, educative and in- spiring as it was disciplinary and impregnable.

The bards’ teaching of their history, memorized in long array of heroic deeds and lofty emotions, fostered the Celt’s sense of freedom, his spirit of joyful submission to the chief and his inherent belief in the equality of man. “My foes are thy foes, thy griefs mine,” was claimed equally by chief or clansman. It was no disparagement among lesser septs if the chief married the humblest maid of the clan.

Such inheritance of liberty and heroism, poverty and romance, we may look upon as a likely nursery of genius.

As some savage element of a race (wrote George MacDonald) will re-appear in an individual of it after ages of civilization, so may good old ways of thinking and feeling, modes long gone out of fashion and practice, survive and revive modified by circumstance, in an individual of a new age. ... When the operative force of such regards has been fostered by the teaching of a revered parent .. . there can be no bound set to their possible potency in a mind of high spiritual order.?

1 In a letter to The Spectator, July 1867, vide postea, p. 818. * What's Mine’s Mine, 1886, vol. i, p. 66. 38

THE MACDONALD DESCENT 39

No one may pretend to understand the Gael, his devotion to the soil, his love of liberty, his intolerance of injustice, his eloquence and love of learning—wit- nessed alike in Scottish Highlander, Irishman and Welshman—unless he realize the significance of Senna- chie, of bagpipes and harp, of claymore and _ tartan, as the outward and visible correspondences with the spiritual clan-faith. George MacDonald inherited all the characteristic virtues; and the clan-system, a social law built upon Faith rather than Competition, may in large measure explain his rooted fidelity to God and man.

George MacDonald’s grandfather, named Charles Edward! after the Young Pretender, was, as has already been said, born three months before Culloden, and his mother died on the day of its disaster when the news of the battle reached her. Charles Edward’s father, William, was one of the few who escaped Cumberland’s ruthless stalking of every fugitive. My

father’s grandmother remembered him well, and the

description of him given in Robert Falconer, my father told us, was almost in her exact words:

He was a gey (considerably) auld man than, but as straucht as an ellwand, and jist pooerfu’ beyon’ belief. His shackle-bane (wrist) was as thick as baith mine; and years and years efter that, whan he tuik his son, my husband and his grandson ane in ilka han’, jist for the fun o’ *t, he kneipit their heids thegither, as gin they hed been twa carldoddies (stalks of rib-grass).*

Tradition tells how when he and his eldest son were passing through Nairn in their flight from Culloden, they were pursued by the townspeople, the blacksmith flourishing a redhot iron, and how their long legs

1 In the Huntly Parochial Registers—e.g. on the occasions of his marriage to Isobel Robertson in 1778 and the birth of his children— we find the name as ‘‘ Charles” only. In those days a double name, unless in the case of peers, was almost unknown. My great-grandfather’s birth appears never to have been registered. But his father was a Catholic, and like most of his co-religionists would never have consented to the parochial registers.

2 Robert Falconer, vol. i, p. 65.

40 GEORGE MACDONALD

carried them to safety. They hid and were secretly fed for months among the caves of Portsoy in spite of the proximity of these to his narrowly watched home, until, perhaps because the loss of his eyesight was considered sufficient penalty, he was forgotten.' It was at Portsoy that William’s father, after his escape with his father from Glencoe, had settled and started business as quarryman and polisher of Portsoy marble.

Before the final overthrow of the clan-system in 1846, the family had farmed their own land, as I understood from my father; but it was of course then confiscated. It was probably near Portsoy; in Robert Falconer, which in details treats so largely of actual circumstances, it is mentioned as a few houses only, a kailyard or two, “wi? a bit fairmy (farm) on the tap o’ a cauld hill near the seashore.” The story of the Highlander’s escape is elaborated into fiction in Malcolm; but the Duncan McPhail of the novel, with his implacable hatred of the Campbells for their treachery at Glencoe,? their massacre in Strathbogie in 1689—when they left the country, it was said, “* man- less and moneyless, horseless and armless,” and their successful ruse at Culloden, where the Clan Ranald,

1 Caves on the north coast of Aberdeen, Banff and Elgin had been always associated with pipers. Should they be sauntering on the shore in the twilight some fairy lure might tempt them into any deep and gloomy cavern; and they would wander, all unconscious of danger, for miles inland until beneath this or that farm-kitchen or heather-clad hill to which they had been led. But because of the spell put upon them they would never more return. Only, from time to time their weird music might be heard in such places on still, starry nights, making little children and lovers weep for they knew not what.

2 My father claims that revenge is not a characteristic of the Gael. It may be found in individual, but not in the race; and their literature contains nothing to foster such feeling. (Malcelm, vol. i, p. 188.) 4

Retribution, according to my friend James A. Campbell of Barbreck, was rather a law of Nature than called for by any instinct of hatred ; and he illustrates it by an incident occurring in his family at the beginning of the seventeenth century. The perpetrator of an accidental death was sought by a rival sept of Campbells to extort the inevitable penalty. His foster brother, Donald MacCallum, donned his clothes while the fugitive slept and got himself shot in his stead. The avenging sept showed every honour to the hero and settled a croft upon his family for all time.

THE MACDONALD DESCENT 41

to which sept our family belongs, fought to the death— though drawn from a well-known character, was no portrait of the author’s ancestor.

Though most of the Portsoy men who fought for Prince Charlie followed Sir William Dunbar of Durn,}! this grandfather of George MacDonald senior, being Town’s Piper of Portsoy,? joined the Frasers, who were Catholics to a man, and contributed a large contingent to the insurrectionary forces. The piper’s office, it should be noted, was still one of high rank, and had been often hereditary. Even when no quarter was given, his life would be spared by any Highland victors, and if taken prisoner, would be treated with the utmost consideration and honour. The Hanoverian Lowland troops would have shown him no such respect, and our ancestor was too proud to yield to any Campbell. So he fled; and was spared for the honour of being great-grandfather to the greatest of all the MacDonald bards.

The grandfather of this piper, as doubtless the documents in the family chanter-chest, destroyed by

1 He served as a volunteer, and his great-grandson was one of the Jameson Raiders in the Transvaal.

? From “A list of Persons concerned in the Rebellion [1745-6] trans- mitted to the Commissioners of Excise by the several Supervisors in Scot- land in obedience to a general letter of the 7th May, 1746,” with preface by the Earl of Rosebery. Scottish History Society, 1890.

s % * %

List of Persons concerned in the Rebellion transmitted to the Board by Mr. Tolm Stuart, Supervisor of Excise at Banff.

Station amongst the Where

: Abode. County. Rebels and circum- | they are sisi iii te i stances of Rebellion. now. William 2 McDonald Piper Portsoy Banff Piper

8 J hope he was not attendant upon Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat, of infamous repute.

42 GEORGE MACDONALD

George MacDonald’s grandmother, would have proved, was one of the few of his clan who escaped massacre at Glencoe.

And it is Glencoe that must be looked upon as the traditional home of Clan Donald, which thence traced its descent back to the Lord of the Isles. It is, one may well believe, of some import in the inheritance of George MacDonald. Most who visit it are oppressed with a feeling of awe, even of terror—so endless seems its narrow cleft, so gloomy its barren mountains, with their wind and mist and rain. But nearer intimacy tells another story. Its warmth and fertility, its woody, roe-haunted springs, and the sky-blue burn that races and loiters in circuitous whirl through the peaceful glen, its bird-song from sky or rowan-bower ; these and its desolating storms combined to make fit stronghold for a brave and poetical people. For all the Maclains—that tribe of the Clan Donald who claimed Glencoe for their own—were poets. It used to be said that no man thereabouts, whatever blood and features he might boast, was a Maclain if he never expressed himself in rime.

The story of the fatal night is variously told; but there can be little doubt as to the main points. Only one tradition connecting it with George MacDonald is extant, and that, for reasons given, cannot be authenticated.

The MacDonalds, or rather the Maclains, after entertaining the Campbells for fifteen days with lavish hospitality, were butchered by their guests in the dead of night. Alastir MacAonghais, as he was called locally, the half-brother of the old chief, and but a year or two younger, was at Brecklet at the time and had some warning of the treachery. So, with his family and some live stock, he crossed the River Laroch to the Ballachulish side of the pass, thus escaping the doom of his brother. The story goes that at the Jacobite rising of 1715, this Alastir, then over ninety years, was still living. When the Glencoe

THE MACDONALD DESCENT 43

men marched away for Sheriffmuir, he insisted on going with them in spite of his people’s protest. To save him from being a burden to the contingent, they sent a messenger after him with the news that his wife was dying. He returned at once—only to find her in perfect health and to be laughed at by her for preferring her society to that of the camp. In the morning he rose early, harnessed an old horse and rode away, never to return, though the battle was fought ere he came up with his people. He was buried at Dunblane. If this old warrior was my father’s ancestor, he must have been grandfather to the piper of Culloden. The piper is said to have had a large family, only two of whom can be accounted for, Charles Edward, George MacDonald’s grandfather, and an older brother, William, who was great- grandfather to my cousin, Dr. John MacDonald of Kildrummy.

The traditions of bardic renown are perhaps of as much importance in George MacDonald’s inheritance as ingrain valour and loyalty. Whether the Clan Donald poets excelled those of other clans I do not know; but their high reputation is undisputed. Indeed, the bard or sennachie was almost as essential as the chief himself. He represented the intellect and imaginative gifts of his race, and was in himself sufficient answer to those charges of barbarism in which the Anglo-Saxon would, before Culloden, sum up the Highland character.!

To judge from what is still extant of these utter- ances, the poetic mode of declamation long preceded

1 Dr. MacIntosh MacKay had, when minister of Laggan, unique opportunity for intimacy with some of these Sennachies or traditional historians. ‘* Not a few of those,’’ he wrote in an unpublished record of his friendship with Sir Walter Scott, ‘* were men of sound and excellent common sense, and very sound judgment, and of much more extensive information than a stranger might expect to find. From one individual of the class, who was at the same time of good education and remarkable memory, I had but little difficulty in a short time in being able to forward to Sir Walter a full and particular account of the Battle of Mulrog, which Sir Walter has transferred bodily into the Tales of a Grandfather! .. .”

44 GEORGE MACDONALD

the prosaic. Even the law-givers, or Brehons, seem to have promulgated their decrees in verse, and St. Columba, himself of the Bardic Order, wrote mostly in metre. Indeed, my father’s claim that, so far from poetry being but elaborated prose, as is commonly held, prose should be regarded as broken-down poetry, is largely justified by historic evidence.

Yet the bard alone was not enough to give men touch with their deepest possibilities, without music ; and the harp, later the bagpipes and violin, were his lieutenants. The bard, too, had other and more ex- acting duties with his chief; he was secretary, prime minister and aide-de-camp; and second only to him in the executive was the piper.t

A nation whose chief notion of discipline was military compulsion could hardly realize the sublimity of an obedience inspired by love and devotion. If a Celt fought well because he hated too well, he often sinned because he loved too well; and he forgave, when he did forgive, with open hand and purse. If his ethics were in need of Christian discipline, his spiritual understanding needed no clerical dogmas either to refine or support it. His vision made of the Gael a singer in battle and in love, on mountain-top and by the cradle-side; it made of him a staunch sup- porter of Rome, a cruel Covenanter, or __a__stern

1 It is related that after witnessing the Battle of Inverlochy from the turrets of its old castle (1644), the most notorious of the MacDonald bards, Iain Lom (Brown John), whose hatred of the Campbells may have suggested to my father the character of Duncan MacPhail in Malcolm, wrote his most splendid poem extolling his leader, Alastair MacDonald, and ridiculing the Campbells, or ‘* Blackcocks,”’ in satire only less bitter than their enemy’s claymore. Thereupon Argyll, chafing under his lash, offered a big price for the poet’s head. Jain Lom, knowing the Marquis’s courtesy as a Highlander would outweigh his animus, repaired to Inverary, delivered himself up and demanded the reward. Argyll received him most courteously in a room where the poet’s attention was arrested by the heads of blackcock hanging on, the walls. ‘‘ You have never seen so many blackcock heads before, I am thinking?” said his host. ‘* Yes, that have I!” was the answer. ‘‘ Where, then?’ ‘* At Inverlochy !” ** Oh, John,” exclaimed Argyll, ‘‘ will you never have done with gnawing at us Campbells?” ‘‘ My only regret, mighty Chief,’ was the reply, ‘is that I cannot devour them!”

THE MACDONALD DESCENT 45

believer in the Shorter Catechism as the only guide eee eR “~~ These references to George MacDonald’s racial inheritance—one of romance, devotion and piety, of unlettered literature and song, of poverty and free- dom—are of first importance in understanding his character and work. Every point in it stands out nobly in him—even the quality of anger. For though this aboriginal virtue was in him, for the most part submerged (as our latter-day psychologist would express it), it would upon occasion flame up in indig- nation against any denial of beauty and truth, any cruelty, any trimming of Christ’s teaching.2 Even then its incentive was love; and it gave one some under- standing of what the wrath of God might have meant to old Mrs. Charles Edward MacDonald when she was driven to lay her son’s fiddle upon the flames.

1 “Old Scotland,’? wrote my father, ‘‘ has the sweetest songs in its cottages, and the worst singing in its churches, of any country in the

world.” (David Elginbrod, vol. iii, p. 99.) 2 For one instance, vide p. 557.

¢

CHAPTER IV THE MACKAY DESCENT

EYOND the facts of her beauty, the tender letter already quoted and her four sons of unusual character, we know little of George MacDonald’s mother. Her relatives and forbears, how- ever, were renowned in science and travel, in adventure and arms, in piety and politics. Her elder brother, MacIntosh MacKay, was, as already mentioned, a Celtic scholar and a friend of Sir Walter Scott; but, though a stern Calvinist, he could rebel, and was one of the prime movers in the disruption of the Scottish Church. Her only other brother was an officer who fought at Waterloo, George MacKay, a man of con- siderable intellectual parts, and the father of the beautiful Helen, who figures significantly in her cousin, George MacDonald’s earlier life. The sisters of my Grandmother MacDonald remained single (with one exception) and lived by teaching.! One of these sisters, - my great-aunt Christina, took charge of my father and his brothers when their mother died. The MacKay clan, Celtic no less than the Clan Donald, belonged to the north-west of Sutherlandshire, 1 But being indifferently trained in the arts of water-colour drawing, embroidering French-lawn collarettes, netting silk purses, and ‘* touching the harp strings,” not to mention deportment and languishing, they found it difficult to get employment. Their Highland: origin, moreover, prejudiced the Glasgow mothers against them. So at least Mistress Anne Grant, the well-known writer of Letters from the Mountains and the constant correspondent with their brother MacIntosh, accounted for her difficulty

in finding situations for them, in spite of their intimacy with the classics

and French. 46

THE MACKAY DESCENT 47

Lord Reay’s country. The spirit of enterprise was as strong in these men as, in a smaller way, in Charles Edward MacDonald, his sons and grandsons. Some- thing in full must be related of MacIntosh MacKay, because of his intimacy with his nephew—of whose genius he was proud enough, though greatly disturbed over his heresies. He was born in 1793,! and died in 1873. He became a minister in the Established Church, but was a leader in its disruption in 1848, becoming Moderator of the General Assembly of the Free Church. His claim to distinction is his scholarship. He was editor of The Gaelic Dictionary, and himself wrote fully four-fifths, as my father was informed and made note of in his copy of that book.2. He had been offered quite early in his career the Humanity or Latin Chair in Glasgow. Tempting though the offer was, and while knowing his competency to fill it, he declined it: “I would not reconcile myself to the step of forsaking the sacred office to which I knew revered parents had early sought to devote me, and to which | I have hitherto been hoping that I had dedicated myself.’’ I remember him in 1868 as a stern, smileless old man with a massive forehead, who evinced his affection for the shy great-nephew by reproving his bad penmanship.

Sir Walter Scott, to whom he introduced the poetry of Robert MacKay or Rob Donn, and whom he helped in research among the Highlands, describes him as ““a simple, learned man and a Highlander, who weighs his own nation justly ; a modest and estimable person.” Sir Walter introduced to him William Forbes Skene, the subsequent historian of Celtic Scotland, in order

1 The Dictionary of National Biography incorrectly places his birth in the year 1800. He was buried in Duddingston Churchyard, where an elaborate tombstone gives the date of his death in his eightieth year as May 17, 1873.

2 ‘He [Sir Walter Scott] had a visit from the learned and pious Dr. M. MacKay, the minister of Laggan, but now of Dunoon, the chief author of The Gaelic Dictionary, then recently published under the auspices of the Highland Society... . (Lockhari’s Life of Sir Walter Scott, vol. vii, p. 283.)

48 GEORGE MACDONALD

that, as a lad under the minister’s roof at Laggan, he might study Gaelic.

Dr. MacKay’s and my grandmother’s father was Captain Alexander MacKay of Duard Beg, in Suther- landshire, and their mother was Helen Falconer, daughter of the Rev. Alexander Falconer who in 1764 entered on his ministry at Edderachillis in Lord Reay’s country in succession to the Rev. George Brodie. Captain Alexander’s father was John MacKay, of Auldanrinie, who married Christina Brodie, daughter of the Rev. George Brodie, minister of Edderachillis from 1715 to 1740: the Christina whose beauty was sung by Rob Donn, the Reay country bard, of whom a life was written by Dr. MacIntosh MacKay. The Rev. George Brodie’s wife, Barbara MacKay, was a lineal descendant of John Abrach MacKay, founder of the Clan Abrach branch of the MacKays, who flourished about 1480. Thus my father’s Sutherland descent may well be regarded as of some importance among the many contributory streams of his inheri- | tance. Helen Falconer’s mother was Mary MacIntosh, sister of George MacIntosh, an influential Glasgow spinner and aunt to Charles MacIntosh, F.R.S.1

Much might be said of the Reay country as the time-honoured home of the MacKays, to show how the future poet may have been indebted to it for some of their racial characteristics. A more forbidding yet grander environment could hardly be found, with

1 These particulars are taken from Dr. H. Scott’s Fasti Ecclesie Scotiane, and are supplemented from the History of the House and Clan of MacKay, by Robert MacKay, 1829, and annotated by my father.

In a letter of Dr. MacIntosh MacKay to my mother’s youngest sister, he says: “‘ I was born November 18, 1793 at Duardbeg, parish of Eddera- chillis, county of Sutherland. My paternal great-grandfather [George Brodie], and my maternal grandfather [Alexander Falconer], were ministers of that Parish. My father’s ancestors for generations were eminent in battle, one of them specially honoured by King William III at Battle of Stenkirk, 1692. My father served with distinction in the Irish Rebellion,

1798. Better honours are from above. Read my own poor character

in Rom. vii, specially in verses 24 and first } of 25, and in chapter viii, last two verses.

“ M. MacKay.” ** September 14, 1870.”

THE MACKAY DESCENT 49

its great bare mountains swathed in mist or flaming in sunset glory, its bitter coast-line with sky-blue lochs and roaring rivers, its poor patches of fertile soil and its craggy pasturage for stag and sheep. Life was a contest with Nature, yet full of her sub- limest ministration, and the people of Lord Reay’s country found the secret of her ways and throve upon them—“ simple-hearted children of God,’ Dr. MacKay describes them; “ but all this is now changed.” 1

But to continue. The MacIntosh collaterals are of some importance. Thus, among my grandmother’s first cousins was Charles MacIntosh, who invented the hot-air blast and gave to the industrial revolution, then still in its infancy, its amazing possibilities. His brother John, Captain of an East Indiaman and an ardent player on the bagpipes, built for himself Long- wood House, in St. Helena, where Napoleon died. Another, William, an indigo-planter, lost his money in the French Revolution, and married his daughter to a marquis de Colville, to whom Charles MacIntosh gave — the French patent rights of the hot-air blast as a magnificent wedding gift: to be gambled away in six months, when my lord, returning to Glasgow to ask for another patent, was kicked out for his pains.*

Concerning the MacKay pedigree, Dr. MacIntosh MacKay states that he is unable to go farther back than his great-grandfather, who fought at Killie- crankie under General Hugh MacKay, whom my father always believed was also akin. The great General’s sons died without issue.

1 “Tt was discontent with poverty that began the ruin of the High- lands! If the heads of the people had but lived pure, active, sober, unostentatious lives, satisfied to be poor, poverty would never have overwhelmed them! The Highlands would have made Scotland great with the greatness of men dignified by high-hearted contentment, and strong with the strength of men who could do without!”—a passage which illustrates the sort of toryism that was the very backbone of George MacDonald’s belief in social and individual evolution. (What's Mine’s Mine, vol. iii, p. 199.)

2 The Marquis’s three daughters were as beautiful as their mother, and

married, the eldest Baron St. Machose, the second Baron de Rasac, the third a M. de Lamont. 4

50 GEORGE MACDONALD

My father’s other maternal uncle, Lieutenant George MacKay, married a Miss Janet Paterson, apparently an heiress, and lived at Banff. He had been appointed to an ensigncy in the 82nd Regiment in October 1818, with orders to join the 1st Battalion in the Peninsular. After Waterloo he was gazetted Lieutenant and pro- ceeded with his regiment to Canada, where he dis- tinguished himself greatly, but was presently retired on half-pay along with so many officers at that time. Thereafter he adopted a commercial life, was a J.P., and studied painting, besides devoting himself to public affairs. His charming personality made him beloved by all classes and ages. Helen, his second daughter—as beautiful as she was clever, my mother always declared—was sent to a finishing school in London; and her father, having business relations with the firm of leather-factors in the City of London, T. J. & T. Powell, begged my grandfather, James Powell, to befriend her. This led to close friendship and the introduction of her cousin George MacDonald to the family of James Powell and my father’s falling in love with Louisa Powell, my mother. Helen had already married Alexander Powell, my mother’s elder brother.

CHAPTER V BOYHOOD

depended upon his creation of the world on which

he thrives. His cereals, root-crops and fruits, if nothing else, are of his own evolving; and upon such foundations his mental upbuilding has become possible. What is true of the race is epitomized in the individual. He discovers and creates the world in which he lives and moves, though different initial equipment, among offspring even of the same parents, qualifies differently the world each inhabits. The child is creating his world none the less that it is throughout fashioning himself.

Consequently, if we would know the world of George MacDonald’s nurture and growth, we must realize his environment as it looked to and was created by the boy’s own eyes—not as a guide-book, or even his own brothers, would describe it. Indeed it was quite a different world from his playmates’; though the meadows and rivers, the bleaching linen and blue skies, the cruel snows and celestial flowers, ostensibly looked and gave the same to all. It was not that he coloured “The Little Grey Town” with pigments from his paint-box, but rather that his keener vision everywhere disclosed fairyland and bewitchment, chivalry and devotion. Whether mastering his Shorter Sexy Catechism, or playing his furious games or lying sick with the pleurisy, he was always surveying and tilling the land that fed him.

[: may be said that the evolution of man has

51

Ke

52 GEORGE MACDONALD

George MacDonald’s “ earliest definable memory,” he tells us, was, when between two and three years old, the funeral of the Duke of Gordon, already men- tioned.1 The Duke had died in London, and the body was brought to Elgin via Huntly—a six-weeks’ journey. And this is what the little child saw: Countless black carriages drawn by black horses with postillions, and all draped in black velvet and nodding plumes.?

Earlier impressions of happy omen had of course been busy at work, moulding the little boy’s alert yet so far passive brain long before this; that the memory of these was blotted out while that of the terrible emblem of death remained indelible, makes us ask whether it accounted for some of that melancholy which all through his later boyhood dogged his innate gaiety. But happy influences were certainly and early at work also, and are often referred to in his writings. In his poem called The Hills he so describes some of his home’s surroundings that one sees even in his early years his mystic interpretation of things.®

George and Helen MacDonald had in all six children —all boys. James, the third of them, died when he was eight, and John MacKay, born in 1829, died in infancy. The others were Charles, George, Alexander and John Hill, the last two being respectively three and six years younger than George. George was eight years old when their mother died in 1832. Then their aunt, Miss Christina MacKay, came to live with them, her love and devotion being always remembered by her nephews.

Seven years after the death of his first wife their father married Miss Margaret McColl. She was a sister to Alexander Stewart McColl of Edinburgh,‘ to

1 “A Sketch of Individual Development,” appearing in the British Quarterly Review for January 1882, and reprinted in A Dish of Orts, 1898. Alexander, 4th Duke of Gordon, died on June 17, 1827 ; so that my father was just two and a half years old at the time of the funeral.

2 Recollections of Huntly, by George Gray, Banff, 1892.

3 Poetical Works, vol. ii, p. 3.

* Thus she was aunt to Norman McColl, Fellow of Downing and Editor of the Atheneum from 1871 to 1900.

BOYHOOD 53

whom my father acknowledged his indebtedness for the elucidation of Hamlet’s great soliloquy, and dedi- cated to him his book on Hamlet, naming him—‘ a little less than kin and more than kind.” To an uncle of his stepmother, Dr. Duncan McColl, R.N., he dedicated The Portent.

The new wife took the place of mother in the hearts of both father and boys; indeed my father owed to her everything that the most devoted of mothers can give. My own intimacy with her—for she died only in 1910 in her 102nd year, all her faculties except hearing unimpaired—revealed a tenderness of heart, a

patience in adversity, a penetrating wisdom, together 4 x »

with a power of sympathy that account for much of the Celt’s characteristic charm. She was pure Highland. The boys’ new mother found her task less onerous then usually befalls. She used to say that one of the first things that struck her in her new home was the fine manners and courtesy of all the boys. If one of their elders rose to leave the room, either George or’ Alee would be always beforehand to open the door. She could not drop a thimble or a ball of wool but it was instantly picked up for her. They never were allowed to speak broad Scotch at table or before their elders, though among themselves and social inferiors they would lapse into the vernacular.

But even before the advent of their second mother the MacDonald boys had a happy childhood. There was always plenty of fun among themselves and with their elders. It must have been a couple of years, I take it, before George’s mother died—hefore, in fact, the Shorter Catechism had tackled the old Adam in his little heart, that George was strutting about in his first pair of trousers before his-Unele—William, when the Tatter vowed he now needed only a watch and a wife to make a man of him. “I can do well enough wanting the watch,” promptly answered the little fellow, “‘ but—but, I would like that I had a wee wifie !” ae ica sures Oe OR ai

—————

ee te

af 3

y ¥%

54 GEORGE MACDONALD

Sufficient discipline ruled the home. A look of displeasure from the beloved father was punishment for any sin, while his rebuke was awful indeed. Any complaints against their wild escapades, unless involving disobedience, he would smile at, though he might warn and restrict. There was plenty for the hungriest boys of all that was necessary—except, to be sure, oxygen indoors; but clothes were mostly shabby, and money was always scarce. On the other hand there were cattle in the byre, horses in the stable, wild bees’ nests in the stone dykes, whose honeycomb eaten like bread was a priceless joy; there were pools for swimming, and a river for boating. There was fishing with rod and net, the latter especially when the rivers were swollen and muddy and the trout unable to see their way, like “human mortals in a thick fog, whether of the atmosphere or of circum- stance.” 1 How the nickums got horsehair for their rods has already been told. Nor must it be forgotten that of high importance in an imaginative boy’s educa- tion, even though pedagogues denied them, were Kelpies in the dark pots of mountain-burnies or the still blacker pools of peat-cuttings on the moor. To these boys the world was a constant invitation to adventure, for they read into its realistic sweetness and terror the trappings of imaginative romance.

My father’s love of horses and intimacy with every creature he handled date from his earliest childhood. His father’s tenderness towards all living things and pity for their sorrows was, I think, never hid from his boys.2, Of one grey mare he used to tell us—and indeed told the world in his writings. Whose her sire or whence she came, he did not know. Her small head and broad chest, clean limbs, and quarters so supple and sinewy that, when the boy had _ half scrambled, half leaped upon her bare back, she would

1 Alec Forbes, vol. i, p. 67.

p * I recall a letter of my grandfather’s from the Cabrach concerning the cruelties of grouse-shooting.

BOYHOOD 55

rush away like the wind, as if possessed by her rider’s very soul, convinced him that Arab blood was in her. She was “ Missy ’—alike at The Farm and in Ranald Bannerman’s Boyhood. He would lie sometimes peace- fully on her back reading his book, The Pilgrim’s Progress, Paradise Lost, or Klopstock’s Messiah, and: possibly, omnivorous boy that he was, Young’s Night Thoughts—while “she ground and mashed away at the grass as if nobody were near her.’’ }

He tells how they first learned to ride the plough- horses at watering time; how they would drop

head and neck and shoulders like a certain toy-bird, causing the young riders a vague fear of falling over the height no longer defended by the uplifted crest; and then drink and drink till the riders’ legs felt the horses’ bodies swelling under them; then up and away again with quick refreshed stride or trot towards the paradise of their stalls. But for us came first the somewhat fearful pass of the stable-door, for they never stopped, like better educated horses, to let their riders dismount, but walked right in, and there was just room, by stooping low, to clear the top of the door. As we improved in equitation, we would go afield, to ride them home from the pasture, where they . were fastened by chains to short stakes of iron driven into the earth. There was more of adventure here, for not only was the ride longer, but the horses were more frisky, and would sometimes set off at the gallop.?

But the boy’s father would not allow them a saddle till they had a sure seat on the bare back; and there- after they needed but little teaching.®

After his father’s second marriage there came three little sisters to these lads, Isabella in 1841, Louisa in 1843 and Jane in 1846. Isabella died at the age of fourteen with acute tuberculosis of the lungs. When she was twelve years old she had sent her

1 Ranald Bannerman’s Boyhood, p. 54.

2 Loe. cit. ® In a letter dated August 15, 1855, from my grandfather to my mother he says: ‘“... you express a wish that I had seen him mounted on a

noble steed as you had done somewhere in the country. You may just ask himself whether on various occasions I was not most tempted to thrash the rogue’s back for his feats at horsemanship. ...’ In later years, whenever my father had the opportunity on a friend’s mount of following the hounds, he was never other than at home.

56 GEORGE MACDONALD

brother George a present of a knitted silk purse, to which he replies :

How much I should like to spend a winter at home again, a snowy winter, with great heaps and wreaths of snow; and sometimes the wild wind howling in the chimneys and against the windows and down at the kitchen door! And how much I should love to spend one long summer day in June, lying on the grass before the house, and looking up into the deep sky with large white clouds in it. And when I lifted my head I should see the dear old hills all round about; and the shining of the Bogie, whose rush I should hear far off and soft, making a noise hardly louder than a lot of midges. . . . And then the warmer evening, with long grass in the field where the well is, and the corn-craik crying craik-craik—somewhere in it, though nobody knows where... .

Again in a letter to his father he speaks of running with his brother “‘ through the long grass of a certain field on a warm summer night trying to catch the corn scraich, till recalled by you and reprimanded for trampling down the grass ’’; and then of the well, from which “‘on hot noon days I so often fetched you a jug of cold water when you came into the house hot and thirsty.”

It is only when the youthful imagination sees things in their full significance that they imprint them- selves on the palimpsest of the brain in such wise that they will never be erased. As surely as Robert Burns’s soul was translated into the mouse’s when she lit upon her tragedy, so was George MacDonald’s into the little hedgehog’s :

A gray hedghog ran With tangled mesh of bristling spikes, and face Helplessly innocent, across the field : He let it run, and blessed it as it ran.

It was because of the boy’s love for the plough- horse that, as he watched its kindly labour, he became that horse, felt as it felt, leaned against collar with its great weight, quick cropped at a tussock at the

w * turn, and worked no less hard for that moment’s lapse

1 A Hidden Life.

Pt

BOYHOOD 57

from duty. Only because of his magical gift could himself, unskilled in ploughing, have written of plough- man’s love and horses’ obedience as he sets them before us in A Hidden Life—the “Classic Epic of Student Life in Aberdeen,” as Sir William Duguid Geddes, his fellow student and late Principal of the University, names this poem.

With sure eye, He saw the horses keep the arrow-track ; He saw the swift share cut the measured sod ; He saw the furrow folding to the right, Ready with nimble foot to aid at need. And there the slain sod lay, patient for grain, Turning its secrets upward to the sun, And hiding in a grave green sun-born grass, And daisies dipped in carmine: all must die, That others live, and they arise again.!

In connection with my father’s keen observation of nature, I may mention how on market-days he would, when quite a small boy, be the first out of school and rush off to the Gordon Arms, where shepherds and Highland drovers forgathered. Waiting behind a partition, he would collect all manner of information concerning shepherd and crofter life. Although most of the talk was in Gaelic, he picked up enough to follow the trend of their talk. In after life he made some attempt to master the tongue, but could not afford the time and patience it demanded.

Indeed, to know in what full way the child was father of the man, we must study all his Scottish stories; they are redolent of the soil, so ardently loved by the boy, in all its dealings with men and man’s with it.

Nothing on the place was done by machinery, for the water-mill, ‘“‘ with its dull wooden sounds, made no discord with the sweetness of the hour.” ?

1 Poems, 1857, p. 5; and Poetical Works, 1898, vol. i, p. 186; see also Sir Wm. Geddes’ critique in Blackwood 1891, and quoted infra on p. 5386. 2 Donal Grant, vol. i, p. 111.

> de

58 GEORGE MACDONALD

There may be great pleasure in watching machine-operations (my father writes), but surely none to equal the pleasure we had, If there had been a steam-engine to plough my father’s fields, how could we have ridden home on its back in the evening? Had there been a thrashing machine, could its pleasure have been comparable to that of lying in the straw and watching the grain dance from the sheaves under the skilful flails of the two strong men who belaboured them ? There was a winnowing machine, but quite a tame one, for its wheels I could drive myself—the handle now high as my head, now low as my knee—and watch at the same time the storm of chaff driven like drifting snow-flakes from its wide mouth... . I think I see old Eppie now, filling her sack with what the wind blew her ; not with the grain; Eppie did not covet that; she only wanted her bed filled with fresh springy chaff, on which she would sleep as sound as her rheumatism would let her, and as warm and dry and comfortable as any duchess in the land that happened to have the rheumatism too. . . . What more machines are there now? Strange, wild-looking mad-like machines, as the Scotch would call them, are growling and snapping, and clinking and clattering over our fields, so that it seems to an old boy as if all the sweet poetic twilight of things were vanishing from the country.!

Though in winter the school work began in earnest, it soon provided fresh opportunities for adventure. George was, however, a delicate boy—once in bed for four months; so he was often kept from school, though but half a mile distant, because of the deep snow or the even more treacherous thaw ; his suscepti- bility to pleurisy, for which he would be bled from the arm, made caution necessary. But in spite of such hardships, the winter had its joys, a favourite sport being the excavation of great caves in the snow and battles with snowballs.

All the short day, the sun, though low, was brilliant, and the whole country shone with dazzling whiteness; but after sunset, which took place between three and four o’clock, anything more dreary can hardly be imagined, especially when the keenest of winds rushed in gusts from the north-east, and, lifting the snow-powder from untrodden shadows, blew it, like so many stings, in the face of the freezing traveller.?

It must have been on such winter evenings that the boy’s ingenuity was exercised to find amusement. 1 Ranald Bannerman, p. 51. 2 Loc cit., p. 248.

BOYHOOD 59

Once with the young brothers and cousins at his heels, he rushed into the kitchen, jumped upon the clean-scrubbed table, and began a learned discourse, Indicating Bell Mavor, the maid, as a reprobate past redemption. She flicked at him with her dish-clout, when he turned upon her in righteous anger, as he set straight the improvised bands about his neck: ‘ Div ye no ken fan ye’re speakin’ til a meenister, Bell ? Ye’s no fleg (frighten) awa’ the Rev. Geordie MacDonald as gin he war a buzzin’ flee (fly)! Losh, woman, neist to Dr. Chaumers (Chalmers), he’s the grandest preacher in a’ Scotland !”}

The story is substantiated by an even more humorous incident of which my grandfather in a letter dated April 28, 1850, reminded his son, then temporarily preaching at Whitehaven :

I hope you will be able to stop in Manchester on your way South and preach a sermon to your kindred [Charles and Alec were then living in Manchester] that they may be able to judge of your quali- fications and to be otherwise gratified. By the bye, when I think of it, they have repeatedly heard you long ago, when the basin-stand was your pulpit, and when matters purely local and domestic formed the leading subjects of your prayers before your congregation. I believe you had to thank your own slim form that you were not over- taken by the same awkward kind of calamity which befel one of the brotherhood, who, having got by force and the impulse of his own greater gravitation into the aforesaid pulpit, found when he had occasion to slip out again, that to do so was no easy matter; nay, it was an impossibility until he had discharged his audience, and, having more privately peeled off his trousers, made a shift to crawl out of his involuntary imprisonment! Take care, man, and don’t ever preach in too small a pulpit for fear of the consequences !

But the school was always over by three o’clock, and Saturday was a half-holiday, whose happy antici- pation was somewhat qualified by its appropriation to the Shorter Catechism? and the certainty that

1 I have the story from Miss Bessie Hobrow, whose nurse, Jean Mavor, a native of Huntly, was Bell’s sister, and corresponds in name and description with the farmer’s half-sister at The Mains in Sir Gibbie.

2 The opening phrase of this epitome of Calvinistic dogmas is this: “The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him for ever.” “ For

44 ¥

60 GEORGE MACDONALD

some at least would get a “licking from the tawse or even the more hated alternative of being kept in.”

The first teacher of Charles, George and James was a certain Rev. C S , a Highlander, “a hard man with a severe, not altogether cruel temper, and a quite savage sense of duty ”—the original of the barbarous Murdoch Malison in Alec Forbes. The character, almost incredible to us, was not overdrawn, as a schoolfellow of my father’s assured Mr. R. Troup, though the latter adds that when S emigrated to Australia he made so touching a farewell speech to his scholars, boys and girls, that one of them, Mr. Troup’s informant, must run straight home for a good cry under his father’s counter.?

Little James MacDonald, as already mentioned, died when eight years old, and his schoolfellows, if no others, believed his death was in large part due to S ’s cruelty. But the author of Alec Forbes, creates a divine repentance for the man.

But tawse and pleurisy notwithstanding, George ? made good progress at school, where Latin and mathe- matics were the foundation of most children’s educa- tion, whether their fees were paid by parents or by the parish. Laird’s son and ploughman’s were on equal footing—a fact that largely explained the Scot’s liberalism in politics and that understanding of the fellowman which is the first essential for success in the world. But not only were his lessons easily learned —though even with the brightest boy or girl, any slip in grammar earned fearful punishment, just as the

my part,” writes the author of Alec Forbes, ‘‘ I wish the spiritual engineers who constructed it had, after laying the grandest foundation-stone that aaae could afford them, glorified God by going no further.” (Alec Forbes, vol. i, p. 85.)

1 See footnote, p. 30. When my uncle, Charles MacDonald, went to Sydney in 1857, the first face he knew was that of this schoolmaster, now married to a sister of Dr. MacIntosh MacKay. His immediate question to his one-time pupil was: ‘‘ And are the boys of Huntly always attending to their Shorter Catechism ? ”’

2 Should it in a reader’s ear sound like disrespect that I speak of my father by his Christian name, will that reader please remember that I am old enough to be that little boy’s grandfather.

BOYHOOD 61

Calvinist’s God extorts justice irrespective of respon- sibility—but he read a good deal, lying on the sofa often for hours together. His father had grave doubts as to what work he was fit for:

The neighbours asked what he would make his son: “Tl make a man of him,” the old man said ; “And for the rest, just what he likes himself.” 4

But a dreamer he must have been already, and when still a schoolboy he would read his poetry to favourite schoolfellows. Mr. Troup tells how once he repeated to them a free metrical version of the 14th chapter of Isaiah.

The MacDonald boys had many delights, among them visits to the sea at Portsoy or Banff, where lived their uncle George MacKay and their pretty cousin Helen. Among the long series of letters written to his father up till his death, the first was penned during a holiday at Portsoy. Even in this one, though only nine, he refers to his ill-health ; and it pursued him more or less all through his life. The caligraphy is as admirable as the grammar and diction.

G.M.D. to his Father.

Portsoy, 15 August, 1883, My pDEaR Papa,

I return you many thanks for the kind letter I received on Wednesday. I am happy to hear that you are well. I have been unwell for two or three days, my throat was a little sore and my head very painful, but I am quite well now and have been in the sea today and like it very much. When I was down at the bathing I met a boy who was once a schoolfellow of mine at Mr. S ’s school, and he showed me the carcase of a whale which had been cast on the shore. Mrs. Morrison told me that the men at the green got a good deal of fat of it. . . . Johnny ® is very amusing. He seems to be more frightened at the tub than at the sea. We are all quite well. Would you be so good as come down and stay with

1 ** A Hidden Life,’ Poetical Works, vol. i, p. 145. 2 His youngest brother, then aged nineteen months.

62 GEORGE MACDONALD

us till we go home, Aunt makes me drink the water,’ but I am unwilling to do it. I am sorry that my writing is so bad, but my pen is very bad. I remain, my dear Papa, Your affect. son, GrorcE MacDonaLp.

The next letter is interesting in its reference to some temperance society to whose rules George had subscribed. It also indicates his love of the sea which later rose to almost passionate expression.

' Portsoy, August 1, 1834.

My DEAR Papa,

As you desired me to write to you by the first opportunity I have complied with your request. I received your kind letter just as I was coming out of a boat in which I had been sailing and thank you for it... .I have bathed every day since I came, and I drink the salt water every two days. I have been at Fordyce, I think it was on Wednesday. We were in a very old house with a castle attached. The woman in the house took us up to a room and brought out the gin bottle. Mr. Mortimer pretended to take some of it, and got off with a very good excuse. Jane pretended to take some too but did not taste it. Margaret and James did take some of it, but when it came to me (I had whispered to Mrs. M. that I wouldn’t take it) I said I can’t take it so I got away and did not break any of the Rules of the Temperance Society. There was a Prussian schooner in the harbour and William and I went out with it yesterday morning and came back in the pilot boat. We were far out of sight of land [because of a sea fog] and I did not think it very easy to get over the ship’s side into the boat. I am very fond of the bathing and William will perhaps learn me to swim. You may tell Aunt to send down a shirt to me as she said she would do. Tell Alex and Johnny that I will bring up some marble stones to them.® I have not more to say at present but in the meantime I remain, my dear Papa,

Your Affectionate son, GrorcE MacDonatp.

Spirit drinking was then as now the curse of Scot- land, and the children were familiar enough with its _ evils. Beer, however, was looked upon as beneficial,

1 A usual prescription of the faculty as an adjunct to sea-bathing.

* The Portsoy serpentine is very beautiful and its marbles were greatly prized by the boys.

BOYHOOD 63

and the young people often drank it with their dinner. _ But even they were exposed to the temptation of spirits, as the letter shows. |

In 1837 the Huntly Juvenile Temperance Society was formed with George as its first President, he then being thirteen years old. The school children held a meeting once a fortnight in the MacDonald thread- factory, with young George in the chair, who, in the words of one of the members, always “spoke like a book.” But this is anticipating.

In 1835, I think it was, a beneficent change came to the “ Adventure School,” as it was named, in the appointment, in place of. Mr. S , or the’ Rev. Alexander Millar. He was the son of the minister of the United Secession Church. Under him George made such progress that he excelled all others in his expres- Sive reading. At a certain examination, and at the request of one of the examining ministers, he read aloud a metrical composition of his own, sent in by way of essay, the subject being Patriotism. Millar, recognizing his ability, gave him much help. He was set to teach others, then a fairly common arrange- ment. Millar would hold a morning class before break- fast, and sometimes George, instead of going home, would go with a schoolfellow to his home, join the family standing round the table and share their por- ridge, each with his wooden bicker of milk. Such free hospitality was common all over Scotland: indeed, it may be stated as a law of social life that, wherever the fare is simple and frugal, there hospitality is open and unceremonious. Mr. Millar would invite him after school to go home with him, and their readings at times filled the hours till the boy must partake of the master’s supper-—potatoes and milk, oatcake and butter.

The brief record of dates by my great-grandmother concerning chiefly her grandchildren contains little interest, her penmanship and spelling being laborious. But one important incident is the boys’ energy in the temperance movement :

bay

64 GEORGE MACDONALD

1837. The Huntly Juvenile Temperance Society was begun by four young persons on Tuesday evening the fourth of December. On that same night the gas was first introduced into Huntly for preventing darkness to the town. The Juvenile Temperance Society was begun for preventing darkness to the mind.

A fortnight later the Society numbered twenty-two.

Declaration of the Huntly Juvenile Temperance Society : “We agree to abstain from distilled spirits except for medicinal purposes and to discountenance the causes and practice of Intem- perance.”

A further entry suggests that the juvenile zeal was yielding great results :

February 24, 1841. A whisky shop known by the name of The Pit was this day closed! It was next door to the New Church. Thanks to the Lord!

Though the remaining entry does not bear directly upon temperance, I cannot refrain from quoting it. The stern old Calvinist could not overlook the opening of the new church nor a festive dinner occurring on the same forenoon, particularly as the latter was followed up with a “ dancing ball.”

26th February. The Non-Intrusion Church was opened when the Rev. Mr. Candlish preached upon Matthew 6th chapter and 9th verse, ‘* Hallowed be Thy name.’ On the same forenoon there happened a Cattle Show and a great dinner. A dancing ball began at 9 o’clock and continued until between 3 and 4 o’clock in the morning.

This day being the anniversary of the Birthday of the Earl of March and exactly two years from the laying of the Foundation Stone of the Gordon Schools, a procession of children was formed and several hundreds walked up to the Lodge accompanied by a band of music, and received from her Grace? a cake and an orange each. Let Her GRACE NEVER WEARY IN WELL-DOING.

Nothing better shows the invulnerability of youth’s spirit than the failure of the Shorter Catechism, driven in by the tawes, to spoil the boys’ play—the Scottish

1 The Dowager. The dukedom became extinct at her husband

Alexander’s death in 1837. He was succeeded in the marquisate by George, 9th Marquess of Huntly.

BOYHOOD 65

intrepidity being built upon the rocks of oatmeal, ye education and poverty.

School games were heroic, if furious, almost as bitter and dangerous as such amusements used to be in Ireland—to judge from Will Carleton’s famous stories. The two schools in Huntly were always at daggers drawn, their enmity being hard to account for; certainly it was not due to sectarian or social differences. The battle always began with missiles— “* Stone-showers which descended upon us like hail.” ! My father had never been a good thrower—his chest- ailments easily accounting for this, I think; and his duties lay chiefly in collecting and bringing into the fighting ranks the ammunition. But his spirit soon got him acknowledged as the leader, and his charges at the head of his troop must have been full ‘of meikle micht.” ?

Even in the merry-makings of later life, I remember my father’s spirits as often highest and gayest of all the company.

The boy’s love of the sea evidently increased year by year, till we find another letter written apparently two years later, but whether from Cullen, Portsoy, or Banff is unknown. Unfortunately it is not dated, though from the improved penmanship and mode of expression we may assume he was about twelve. He claims to have reached a final decision as to his future life, and determines that nothing else could be contem- plated by him than the career of a sailor. Possibly

1 Ranald Bannerman’s Boyhood, p. 233. 2 His romantic spirit thus dominating even his games recalls a verse in that rare old ballad, The Battle of Harlaw, published first in 1549 :

** And then throw fair Strathbogie land,

His purpose was for to-pursew,

And quhasoever durst gainstand That race they should full sairly rew ; Then he bad all his men be trew,

And him defend by forss and slicht, And promist them rewardis anew,

And mak them men of meikle micht.”

(Scottish Ballads, Tales and Songs, by John Gilchrist, Edinburgh, 1815, vol. i, p. 31.) 5

ets

66 GEORGE MACDONALD

he knew of his father’s uncertainty as to what he was fit for.

G.M.D. to his Father.

My DEAR FATHER,

It is now time for me to be thinking of what I should betake myself to, and tho’ I would be sorry to displease you in any way, yet I must tell you that the sea is my delight and that I wish to go to it as soon as possible, and I hope that you will not use your parental authority to prevent me, as you undoubtedly can. I feel I would be continually wishing and longing to be at sea. Though a dangerous, it is undoubtedly an honest and lawful employment, or I would scorn ' to be engaged in it. Whatever other things I may have intended were in my childhood days, [so] that you can hardly blame me for being flighty in this respect. O let me, dear father, for I could not be happy at anything else. And I am not altogether ignorant of sea affairs, tho’ I have yet a great deal to learn, for I have been study- ing them for some time back. If it were not for putting you to too much trouble I would beg an answer from you in writing, but I can hardly expect it, though I much wish it.

Your affectionate son GEORGE.

At sixteen this high-spirited, responsible boy’s childhood ended; for in 1840 he entered King’s College, Aberdeen, and his manhood began.

CHAPTER VI THE YOUNG PHILOSOPHER

F a lad intended to enter for the Bursary Com- petition in Aberdeen, he would be sent to a grammar school for a few months to be coached, in Latin particularly. So when George was sixteen he went to the Aulton (Old Town) Grammar School, Aberdeen,} for the months of August, September and October, 1840.

If the School work was dry it was thorough. If that Academy had no sweetly shadowing trees, beyond still was the sea and the sky; and that court, morning and afternoon, was filled with the shouts of eager boys, kicking the football with mad rushings to and fro, and sometimes with wounds and faintings. . . . Shock-headed Highland colts, and rough Lowland steers, as many of them were, out of that group, out of the roughest of them would emerge in time a few gentlemen—large-hearted courteous gentlemen, for whom a man may thank God... .

Though it is Robert Falconer’s experiences thus described, we may be sure it was George MacDonald himself who

would rush into the thick of the football game, fight like a maniac -for one short burst, and then retire and look on, . . . But sometimes, looking up from his Virgil or his Latin version, he would fling down his dictionary or his pen, and fly in a straight line, like a sea-gull weary of lake and river, down to the waste shore of the great deep.?

In November he took the twelfth place in the competition, winning the Fullarton Bursary of £14 per annum. This would generally cover a student’s fees and a great part of his expenses for the five

1 Where Byron was sent to school when seven. It is said to be the

oldest school in the Kingdom, the records dating back to 1256. The low, one-floor building still stands, but was vacated in 1863, when the present school was built.

2 Robert Falconer, vol. ii, p. 53. 67

68 GEORGE MACDONALD

months’ session. He entered King’s College and passed through the usual curriculum of four sessions: “Bajan,” 1840-41; “Semi,” 1841-42; “ Tertian,” 1848-44; and ‘‘ Magistrand,” 1844-45; missing, as will be explained presently, the session 1842-43. He worked hard, though fitfully. He won the third prize in Chemistry and the fourth in Natural Philosophy, and considered seriously going to Giessen for work under von Liebig, many of whose books were already available in English. But this could not be. Then a strong desire took hold of him to study medicine. Here again the want of money stood in the way; so he devoted himself more and more to modern litera- ture and languages. German, attracting his philosophic and poetical tastes, was acquired easily and thoroughly.

The standard of education in Aberdeen in the early days of the century was not high, and the teach- ing*was more like that of English schools; but it was intimate and thorough, qualities that account largely for the northern University’s fine achievements. Ii, it is said, Aberdeen gave fewer scholars to the world than did the English Universities, the faculty of developing their own innate gifts by the men them- selves was more evident, and a higher average of brain- power seems to have been reached.

The following letter, written when half-way through his first winter session, shows that George still accepted the conventional dogmas without questioning.

ABERDEEN, 5 January, 1841. My peEaArR FATHER,

I am much obliged to you for the kind letter which you sent me some time ago. I hope I wish to serve God and to be delivered not only from the punishment of sin, but also from its power. Our potatoes and meal are both almost done. Be so good as to send a fresh supply as soon as convenient. . . . Mr. Kennedy was at our Sabbath school soiree in the Old Town. He preaches most excellent sermons, and he never closes without saying something to the unconverted.

I am, Your ever affectionate son, Gro. MacDonatp.

THE YOUNG PHILOSOPHER 69

The Rev. John Kennedy, D.D., was from 1836 to 1846 pastor of the Blackfriars Congregational Church, which George and his brother Charles attended. The former—possibly the latter also—took Sunday-school classes, and so came into close touch with the minister :1 by whose zeal and faculty for organization hordes of beggar-children roaming the Aberdeen streets were swept into his embryo School of Industry, which gave over 800 children one meal every day and their schooling.

The next letter suggests that already the young student might be questioning the old standards.

G.M.D. to his Father.

ABERDEEN, 28th Oct. 1841.

. . . I found all our friends well, and our lodgings very comfort- able, although the lad who lodges along with us is not so much of a gentleman as we could wish; yet I hope he will not be any the worse in that respect for lodging with us... .

I saw a most splendid procession to-day of the Chartists going out to meet Fergus O’Connor. There were about two thousand of . them in the procession, and there might have been fifteen thousand on the streets. There were several different bands of music and banners and mottoes innumerable. There was a coach and three open carriages which went out to meet O’Connor, two with four horses and one with six horses in which was the chap himself—a pretty good-looking man, but not a good figure—tall and stout. I was down at the links for a short time while he was addressing the people. The scene was really splendid.

I was delighted when I heard the first bursar’s name called out for £30. He is a poor lad from Orkney who was at the Grammar School with me, and was then a good scholar. He competed last year, and got only five pounds, but wouldn’t keep it because it wouldn’t keep him... .

I hope by this time your business is settled. I am in some doubts whether or not I should study Chemistry... .

1 He married a sisteF of Professor John Stuart Blackie and had seven children, the eldest being Sir Alexander Kennedy, F.R.S. Sir Alexander writes to me thus about his father: ‘‘ I have never met or known anyone to whom the word ‘ saintly ’ could be applied so entirely as to my father. To some of us who loved him most, however little we shared his particular opinions, it was the man himself who gave the glory to a narrow and impossible theology.” My father, a warm friend of John Stuart Blackie, kept up his friendship with Dr. Kennedy, though they differed widely in opinion.

iy W

70 GEORGE MACDONALD

The ‘business’? probably concerned the difficult times ahead which threatened George’s career at King’s College. His father was suffering already from the low market prices incident to the changing corn- laws, while Dr. Kennedy and enlightened politicians in Aberdeen were loud in advocating their total repeal. So George was compelled to face the conflict between the conservatism of his upbringing and the new remedies that, as some believed, would cure all social ills.

The state of the poor in the city was terrible and must have wrung his young heart. Even if at home he believed that all poverty, such, for instance, as that of his grandmother’s adoptions, must be due to the just anger of an outraged God, in Aberdeen

The crowds of men, in whom a starving soul Cries through the windows of their hollow eyes For bare humanity,}

might well have bidden him question his theology. _

The study of Chemistry and Natural Philosophy was deferred till the winter of 1843-4. That he won distinction in both is not surprising, seeing that they became minor enthusiasms with him. When a student five years later at Highbury Theological College, it will be told how he instituted on his own responsibility lectures to his fellow students on these subjects. Then again, writing to his father in 1850—a year before he married—and speaking of the possibility of his failure as a preacher, he declares, if he can get someone to lend him a hundred pounds, he will go out to Baron Liebig: “I have little fear of making a good chemist,” he adds. In the Manchester days, too (1853-56), among his many adventures to pay his way, in spite of the increasing family and his constant ill-health, he gave lectures on these subjects at a Ladies’ College.

This love of so precise a science as Chemistry— rigid in laws appertaining to the invisible atom—is

1“ A Hidden Life,” Poetical Works, vol. i, p. 150.

THE YOUNG PHILOSOPHER 71

very interesting when we compare his logical honesty regarding facts with his imaginative grasp of un- demonstrable truth.

Here some may recall his own words regarding the apparent conflict between Science and Poetry:

In the first months of his college life a new phase of experience begins. . . . For a time knowledge is pride. . . . But ever the thing that is known sinks into insignificance, save as a step of the endless stair on which he is climbing—whither he knows not; the unknown draws him ; the new fact touches his mind, flames up in the contact, and drops dark, a mere fact, on the heap below. . . . At the entrance of Science, nobly and gracefully as she bears herself, young Poetry shrinks back startled, dismayed. Poetry is true as Science, and Science is holy as Poetry; but young Poetry is timid and Science is fearless, and bears with her a colder atmosphere than the other has yet learned to brave. ... The youth gazes on the face of Science, cold, clear, beautiful; then, turning, looks for his friend—- but alas! Poetry has fled. With a great pang at the heart he rushes abroad to find her, but descries only the rainbow glimmer of her skirt on the far horizon. . . . “‘ What is the storm any more!” he cries; ‘it is but the clashing of countless water-drops!’’ He finds

relief in the discovery that, the moment you place a man in the midst —

of it, the clashing of water-drops becomes a storm, terrible to heart and brain: human thought and feeling, hope, fear, love, sacrifice, make the motions of nature alive with mystery and the shadows of destiny. . . .1

George MacDonald missed the session of 1842-43, because, I presume, his bursary was not sufficient to meet all expenses, and his father found it impossible to help him. How the difficulty arose is tolerably clear.

As I have already remarked, there was, and at the best of times, never much money at home, not- withstanding an abundance of the bare necessaries of life. But now increasing hardships were assailing all the lesser farmers and crofters, Aberdeenshire being pre-eminently a country of small holdings.? Cheap

1“ 4 Sketch of Individual Development,’’ by George MacDonald, British Quarterly Review, January 1882 ; reprinted in A Dish of Oris, 1893.

2 By 1842 the threat of low prices was thoroughly frightening the corn-growers. Not only this: the industrial revolution was making violent assault upon agriculture, and the opposition of the Tories to Free Trade was largely due to the realization of a fact fully acknowledged by

Sir Robert Peel before his conversion to Free Trade, that machinery would be the ruin of the land.

sae

72 GEORGE MACDONALD

food from abroad was essential if the factory hands, increasing now at an alarming rate in order to meet the demands of machinery, were to be fed; and though removal of the protection had been gradual till the corn-duty was abolished in 1846, the small farmers never recovered.

But apart from this gradual straitening of means up till the year in question, 1842, my grandfather and his brother, Messrs. George and James MacDonald, perennially creditors to the Aberdeen Bank for their brother Charles’s delinquencies, were now subject to additional pressure for the liquidation of the debt they had undertaken to meet; and it is probably to this that reference is made in the letter last quoted. So that my father’s determination to find employ- ment and earn some money before resuming his studies is amply accounted for; and he made his ill the advantage of his good.

As is commonly known, the Aberdeen student, so often of cottar-, ploughman-, or shepherd-parentage, would work on the land during the seven months of summer and earn enough for the five at college; and he would come on foot a hundred miles or more, the carrier bringing beforehand the sack of oatmeal that was to feed him during the winter. But George MacDonald was physically unfitted for such work, though he must often have wished it were possible. So he spent some summer months in a certain castle or mansion in the far North,! the locality of which I have failed to trace, in cataloguing a neglected library. That he did acquire intimate experience of this kind is obvious from his frequent use of such-like material in his fiction—notably in The Portent, David Elginbrod, Wilfrid Cumbermede, There and Back, Donal Grant and Lilith. The library, wherever it was, and whatever its scope, added much to the materials upon which his imagina- tion worked in future years.

1 The fact is recorded by the Rev. Robert Troup, who at one time set down many points he remembered about his wife’s first cousin—all valuable. See also Alec Forbes, vol. iii, p. 66.

THE YOUNG PHILOSOPHER 73

. . - Now I was in my element (he writes). The very outside of a book had a charm to me. It was a kind of sacrament—an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace ; as, indeed, what on God’s earth is not? . . . I found a perfect set of our poets —although it omitted both Chaucer and George Herbert. I began to nibble at that portion of the collection which belonged to the sixteenth century. . . . I found nothing, to my idea, but love-poems without any love in them, and so I soon became weary. But I found in the library what I liked far better—many romances of a very marvellous sort, and plentiful interruption they gave to the formation of the catalogue. I likewise came upon a whole nest of the German classics. . . . Happening to be a tolerable reader of German, I found in these volumes a mine of wealth inexhaustible.

If the schoolmaster Millar first made him look out of window, this library led him out of doors; and beyond the bounds of academic scholarship.?

1 The Porient, 1864, pp. 82 and 88. He may have first found A. E. T. Hoffmann’s works in the library. To them, as is suggested later, pp. 259 and 297, he was possibly much indebted.

2 It is curious that I can find no record of how the summer months of 1842 were spent. In Alec Forbes we find Cupples telling of some “‘ grit leebrary i the far North” where he was employed, and some of this I take to be autobiographical. I have been at considerable pains, both in © correspondence and in travelling, to ascertain where this library was situated ; for its importance in my father’s education cannot be questioned. But I have not been successful, though I have a strong suspicion that it was Thurso Castle, now the property of Sir Archibald Sinclair, Bart., of Ulbster, M.P. It has a fine library, and its owner in 1842 was Sir George Sinclair, son of the first baronet, Sir John, the first President of the Board of Agriculture, a great linguist and collector of German literature, which fact tallies with the account of the library in The Portent. We died in 1835. The fact that my grandfather had some sort of intimacy with him is suggested by the use of his name on an advertisement as recommending the potato-flour or ‘* Farina’ manufac- tured by the MacDonald Brothers at Huntly. But Sir Archibald, who has been most kind in helping me to a conclusion, can find no corroboration of. my surmise.

The only other possible place is Dunbeath Castle, the property of Rear-Admiral Sir Edwyn S. Alexander-Sinclair, R.N., M.V.O. Lady Alexander-Sinclair tells me there was formerly a ‘‘ wonderful library ” there; but that when her husband succeeded in 1892, everything was left to his cousin’s widow, including the books, which, at her death in 1911, were sold. She further says that friends of hers think it very probable that this was the very library my father catalogued.

CHAPTER VII THE YOUNG POET

great library done, resumed his studies in

Aberdeen much strengthened, we may pre- sume, in mind and imaginative outlook. If his life’s adventure was no more than opened, to have bravely begun it was foretaste of victory. From February to November 1848 he taught arithmetic in the Aberdeen Central Academy “with great spirit and skill,’ as its head master, Mr. Thomas Merton, states in a testi- monial; and he secured some private pupils. Dr. Kennedy had all along been a warm friend to this lad, as enthusiastic in teaching as learning, and with sense of responsibility remarkable in one of his years ; and to his house he came thrice a week to coach a student. By such means social pleasures came also, and his popularity in academic society was assured. He was an ardent, if nervous, speaker in the Debating Society ; and at times his Celtic fire would carry all before him. It is told that he figured strong in draw- ing-room charades—the taste for which in England, so Thackeray says, had arrived from France after Waterloo; and it had now penetrated to Aberdeen. In such pleasures he was noted for his ingenuity in devising fantastic habiliments. Some years ago Mr. John Christie, the archeologist, to whom I was indebted for much valuable research work, wrote me that the student George MacDonald used often to

74

Ga MACDONALD, his engagement in the

THE YOUNG POET 75

visit Mr. Christie’s grandfather’s house, and that his mother described the lad on one occasion as taking part in charades; how they rummaged out an old bottle-green coat for him; and how, it being button- less, he cut a huge carrot into discs and sewed them on the coat—the effect being prodigious. Sir Wm. D. Geddes, my father’s junior by two years at King’s College, writing in 1896, says that George MacDonald was quickly recognized as ‘“‘a youth of imaginative power, but, like the typical Celt, dreamily careless of fame and class-list positions,”’ and incidentally remarks : “I remember the radiance of a tartan coat he wore— the most dazzling affair in dress I ever saw a student wear, but characteristic of the young Celtic minstrel.” ! Most of my family prefer to discredit the tartan coat, and my father’s cousin, Helen MacKay, who saw much of him in these days, told me she never saw it. But Sir William Geddes gives it as a fact, and I think we should accept it. We must remember too that, not only did the students all wear “ the scarlet gown with the closed sleeves,” but that the variety of dress among the students—ploughman’s, cottar’s and shepherd’s sons, young lairds and even sprigs of the Scottish nobility, occasionally in their kilts, must have been remarkable and delightful. My father might have found an old tartan coat at home and worn it partly for economy, and yet because he liked it.? _ It was on his return to Aberdeen in 1843—he being not yet twenty—that Robert Troup, having just entered

1 * Poetic Ideals of Education,” a lecture by Principal W. D. Geddes, 1896.

2 My friend, James A. Campbell of Barbreck, a first authority on such points, writes me that “‘ the tartan coat was often worn in old days, but was driven out by tourists and strangers.” Lockhart tells of a minister and a lawyer “rigged out in new jacket and trousers of the Macgregor tartan,” coming from New England to call upon Sir Walter Scott in 1818. Life, vol. iv, p. 199.

In Heather and Snow (1893) my father describes a young laird as “‘ dressed a little showily in a short coat of dark tartan and a Highland bonnet with a brooch and feather,”’ vol. i, p. 30.

ears

76 GEORGE MACDONALD

his first session, was introduced to him. He wrote thus of him in 1898:

He was studious, quiet, sensitive, imaginative, frank, open, speak- ing freely what he thought. His love of truth was intense, only equalled by his scorn of meanness, his purity and his moral courage. So I found him when I became acquainted with him next session. So I have found him ever since.

In passing I may remark that my father’s dress was generally more or less of a protest against the ugly and unreasonable—and, thanks to_ her own fine taste, my mother always encouraged it. Growing a beard when fashion looked with horror upon such ornament as ‘“ heathenish ’—unless no more than a fringe below the chin, like his father’s !— wearing throughout life his hair a little longer than was latterly usual, his waistcoats fastening up to the low shirt-collar by a close-set superfluity of small cloth or sometimes gilt buttons and worn open for the middle third, showing his unstarched white shirt- front and occasionally a scarlet cravat—he always had a look of bardie splendour about him. At the same time he was scrupulously tidy in his dress— just as in his study—and very particular about his shoes: ‘A fool,” says a Celtic proverb, “is known in the morning: he breaks his shoe-latchet ’—i.e. is clumsy and untidy. But so absolutely unselfconscious was he, that in late years when on one occasion he walked with me down Regent Street, London, with his tartan plaid worn in Highland fashion fastened to the left shoulder by the glimmering topaz in silver setting, he was utterly unaware that everyone turned to look at him, and some even to follow. Just as every word he spoke, or deed he did, or offer he refused, proclaimed the man; so to such a one it was inevitable that his clothing should express his taste, quite oblivious of the world’s praise and censure. The romantic outlook upon the world could not but find correspon- dence in some romantic fashioning of his habiliments. If “of the soul the body form doth take,” then the

THE YOUNG POET 77

very clothing must—in the person of artist, musician, poet, whose work is to portray in outward sign the inward truth—make protest against the slavishness of fashion.

I cannot but think that the common charge of vanity brought against the Highlander is grounded upon stupid observation. The Celt is imaginative above all things, and so tends towards extravagance: but always with restraint, and so with no vanity. Instinctively an artist, he—to adopt this day’s jargon—is no novice in self-expression. It was never vanity that made him devise his noble costume of tartan kilt and plaid— not the less magnificent that it was so often in rags. As his taste compelled the piper to adorn his pipes? with motley, in sympathy with the unuttered music (unutterable to the poor Sassenach !) stored within, so does the Celt tend to express in his person something of that which does not find speech or song. Certainly my father thought far less of his outward appearance than does the average well-groomed Englishman, whose modesty chooses that, there being perhaps little within him that need be expressed, he shall pass in the crowd unnoticed.

Anyhow, my father’s spirits in these student-days were full of a romantic vitality, though perhaps he was not widely appreciated by his fellow students. Sir

1 The modern vulgar bedizenment and display is all a late invention of prosperous Glasgow.

3 This remark calls to mind a single sentence that, as well as any I remember in his writings, bears witness to my father’s lively observation as a boy and his masterly word asaman. Describing the dress of wander- ing Willie, the imbecile piper in Ranald Bannerman’s Boyhood, he says : **So incongruous was his costume that I could never tell whether kilt or trousers was the original foundation upon which it had been constructed. To his tatters add the bits of old ribbon, list, and coloured rag which he attached to his pipes wherever there was room, and you will see that he looked all flags and pennons—a moving grove of raggery out of which came the screaming chant and drone of his instrument. When he danced he was like a whirlwind that had caught up the contents of an old clothes-shop.”’ The italics are mine, of course. Celtic sense of art gone mad indeed, but still not unlovely ! One could wish the new art of this day, in its repudia- tion of law and decency, had enough sanity left to merit description such

as this.

78 GEORGE MACDONALD

William Geddes, afterwards Principal of the University, thus wrote in 1865 to my father when a candidate for the Chair of Rhetoric in Edinburgh :

. . . Though you did not mix much with the students at College, and indeed hardly cared to descend into the ordinary arena of emula- tion, your fellow students were not unaware of the talents which you possessed. I remember distinctly the universal impression regarding you, that you were master of powers which you had not put to the full measure of proof, but which were touched to fine issues and destined to yield great things... .

But it must be understood that if my father did not mix much with other students, there was nothing of the social life belonging to Oxford and Cambridge, unless in the debating societies. Greater friendships, some say, were made, if only because the men, for economy’s sake, went often in pairs, sharing the same lodging and potato, even the same bed, and there was small danger of stifling individuality beneath a veneer of polish. Anyhow, George MacDonald’s gaiety of heart was alternated, not only by periods of anxious thought, but often by something akin to despondency.

I have recollections of him (wrote Mr. Troup) sitting by himself after the meal was over, silent and thoughtful, sometimes apparently musing, and sometimes reading while the others were talking. At other times he took his part heartily in the conversation that was going on. His older friends were anxious about his spiritual state.

Here it will be interesting to put in a word con- cerning Aberdeen itself in matters spiritual. Its whole tendency had always been to conservatism leaning to moderatism, if not indifferentism, until the early days of last century. All over the county the people had only the Established Church to look to, and that in some instances had become such ‘a moral waste ” that it drove old Mrs. Charles Edward MacDonald from the Parish Church. Notwithstanding the intel- lectual activity of Aberdeen itself, it had been the last city to grasp the meaning of the solemn League and Covenant. In a measure it was geographically isolated from other great centres of thought—per-

THE YOUNG POET 79

haps also, because it was, until Culloden, so much under the influence of the House of Gordon.

But the gospel-news of freedom, long ago proclaimed in Scotland’s wars of independence and sung to her peasantry by Burns, was now revived by Rousseau and the French Revolution in the shrewd, calculating heart of granitic Aberdeen; and at last she was asking in philosophic word the eternal questions— even if to fly off at tangents that led nowhere.1 Any- - how, her evangelical fervour was awakened, and no better evidence of its vitality could be found than in Dr. Kennedy’s ministry, following on the heels of that redoubtable Presbyterian Irishman, Dr. Kidd. From 1840 to 1844 a veritable storm began to rage over the whole congregational body of Scotland. In Glasgow, students were expelled from the Congrega- tional Theological Academy for adhering to Dr. Ralph Wardlaw’s doctrine of Universal Redemption, and a number of Congregational Churches were disendowed for holding like views.2 These and the excitement engendered by the offer of release from some of their mental chains took strong hold of certain young men attached to the Blackfriars Congregational Church in Aberdeen, greatly to Dr. Kennedy’s concern. Among these black sheep most certainly was George Mac- Donald. Hence arose the anxiety of some of his best friends, not the least disturbed being his brother Charles, then in business in Aberdeen, who felt account- able for his junior’s doctrinal respectability. But vigorous brain-work was going on all round about him. Other great minds as well as his were in the making. Thus socially, if not academically, he may

1 ** J like a rumbling and a roaring devil best,”’ said Samuel Rutherford, a propos of Aberdeen’s coldness. ‘

2 Even earlier than this the Rev. John MacLeod Campbell had in 1831 been driven from the Established Church for his views on the Atone- ment. The great split in the Church leading to the formation of the Free Church had nothing to do with doctrine, though evangelicalism had some share in its inspiration. It was in 1843 that nearly five hundred clergy seceded, led by Chalmers, Guthrie, MacIntosh, MacKay and Hugh Millar, on account of lay patronage being sustained in the courts.

80 GEORGE MACDONALD

have come in contact with Alexander Bain, that hard-headed supporter of J. S. Mill and opponent to the idealism of Reid, Dugald Stewart and the German philosophers. Among my father’s juniors also was Sir William Geddes. A class-mate of his own was the Rev. Malcolm MacLennan, who wrote more than one book of Scottish stories, which, the Edinburgh Quarterly once said, were “nearly as good as George MacDonald’s, though they lacked his rainbow hope.” But in spite of close touch with fellow-men in study and social pleasures, George MacDonald lived in much real loneliness, his poetic longings taking him far afield. The sea particularly called him to share its turmoil and its peace, its mystic solace in rhythmic beat, its kindred protest in evasion of control.

Of all his fellow students at Aberdeen, the Rev. Robert Troup was the last remaining. George Mac- Donald, he tells us, and one James Maconochie, would sometimes take walks together. One wild night, about ten o’clock, they went to the Links and the seashore to watch the storm.

When Maconochie returned about midnight to his sister’s, he looked anxious and disturbed, and said: “‘ I hope George MacDonald is not going out of his mind. . . . When we got to the shore, he walked backwards and forwards on the sands amid the howling winds

and the beating spray, with the waves coming up to our feet ; and all the time he went on addressing the sea and the waves and the storm.”

He appears to have written poetry more or less throughout these Aberdeen years. Some was copied into a book for his cousin Helen MacKay, along with The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, portions of Shelley’s Wandering Jew, and extracts especially from such poets as Mrs. Hemans, James Hogg, Tom Moore and Stoddart. His free running, yet conventional lines are generally imitative, though occasionally holding a gem of his own cutting and polishing. This is natural to youthful poetic fervour, and their prevailing melancholy and introspection are almost proper to immaturity. Occasionally he gets free from his self-consciousness,

THE YOUNG POET 81

although often his effusions are so weird and obscure that it is difficult to detect their motive. I quote one verse illustrative of the dominant mood and one poem of real power. Yet I am convinced my father could never have approved their publication unless for the light they throw upon an earnest under- graduate’s attempts to express thought and feeling.

Bury me, bury me deep

In some lonely cove on the wild sea’s shore. There none o’er my grave will come and weep: But the maddened waves’ tempest-roar

Will soothe this spirit when, shrouded in gloom, It visits its rough and unlettered tomb!

That the second was inspired by Shelley’s Cloud is obvious enough, but it is something more than imitative.

SonG OF THE SPIRIT OF Havoc.

I rise by night in the stormy light Of the Northern streamers’ play ;

I leave them bebind in the gathering wind That drives to the South away.

Adown we sweep on the ocean deep, And the waves begin their fray ;

Along we rush, and their tops we brush Till they’re crested with foaming spray.

On old Norway’s shore I seek the roar Of the Maelstrom’s whirlpool vast, When, moored hard by, a vessel I spy,

That rocks with uneasy mast :

I dive below beneath the prow, And the straining cable clasp,

Then the creaking chain I snap in twain And the slippery keel I grasp.

Aloft I sail on a cloud of hail, That drifts o’er the whitened land ; Till on Aectna’s height, ’mid the ruddy light Of the crater’s lip, I stand. 6

82 GEORGE MACDONALD

Down, down I go; the fierce flames glow, And I stir their smouldering ire,

Then up I spring, nor need my wing, In a column of roaring fire.

And the lava’s glow, cast up from below, Lights over the sea my path,

While my smoking plumes taint with Actna’s fumes The Simoom with its withering wrath.

And the rush of my flight, in the dead of night, Thro’ Arabia’s heated air,

O’erwhelms in one grave the tyrant and slave, And the Moslem at his prayer.

In my homeward rush a village I crush With an avalanche of snow;

I hurl it down from its rocky throne To the ravenous gorge below.

And a sparkling train of fiery rain From the shaken stars I cast ; ' And the meteor’s glare through the troubled air Tells where my wing hath past.

To the North away, ere yet it be day! For there is the home that I love:

I lay me to sleep in a cave of the deep, With the war of the waves above !

One other poem found in this manuscript book gave him his first opportunity in publication. It is in blank verse and called David. Considerably improved it appeared, unsigned, in the Congregational Magazine for January 1846. It is above the quality of other

_ verse in that journal, though it shows little sign of

its writer’s subsequent. power.

But my father found one great solace to his moods, whether exalted or depressed, in the sympathy of his beautiful and accomplished cousin Helen MacKay.

She was born in February 3, 1822, and so was nearly three years his senior. She died in 1911, six years after him, the last of the MacKays of her line.

THE YOUNG POET 83

Throughout his life the intimacy of their childhood was never broken, and I do not doubt that, brilliant and highly educated as she was, with a beautiful voice and well-trained piano-playing—my mother thought her the most lovely and fascinating girl she had ever met —she did something to shape her Cousin George’s mind and showed sympathy with his spiritual anxieties. In 1840, as I have said, she went to a finishing school in London, the year indeed that her cousin won his bursary ; and she was married in 1844 to Alexander Powell, the brother of her Cousin George’s future wife. Between 1840 and 1844 she must have been much in London, and yet was making some visits to Aberdeen, thus, and probably with regular epistolary exchanges, keeping intimate touch with him. But she could not have been often in the North. Even now it is a long way from London to Aberdeen, and then the journey was always by sea.

That my father was thinking much of the possi- bility of studying medicine is shown by her reference to - it in later years. She once told me she would amuse him by prophesying that somehow he would get his heart’s desire, and “as a stout, elderly M.D. would be driving a good horse on his rounds visiting his patients.” This is pleasant to remember in view of a joke between them in 1868, just after the honorary degree of LL.D. was conferred upon him by his alma mater. She addressed a letter to him.as “* Doctor MacDonald.” Tio which he replied, inter alia, and in a postscript, “Quhat the muckle de’il gars ye pit the Doachier afore my name? Lat it come ahint it gin it likes!” Whereupon his cousin replied: “I thocht ye wad raither hae a Doctor afore ye than a Lang-Leggit-De’al (ie. LL.D.) rinnin’ aifter ye!” And my father’s reply kept the ball rolling: ‘“ ’Deed, lassie, ye hae the best o’t aboot the doctor an’ the deil.”

The two would, in their many letters to one another

1 Concerning whose romantic and humorous courtship, vide posted, p. 100.

84 GEORGE MACDONALD

in after life, often use the broadest tongue, for a sentence or two, particularly when humorous, even though it is perhaps the most unmusical dialect in ~ all Scotland.

But, fun and high spirits notwithstanding, young George MacDonald would have been, I truly think, very lonely, but for this loving friend. ‘‘I was able to help him when he was puzzled and undecided as to what life he was fit for,” she wrote me a year after his death. She told me that already in Aberdeen he began to feel that one day he would be a poet, and that ‘he wrote many beautiful little things,” she said, ‘‘ as the lovely light began its dawn.”’ She told me also that he was often much depressed in spirits— a quite usual characteristic, indeed, of the high- spirited Gael—and that she knew she was of use to him. She said a favourite saying of his then was, ‘““I wis we war a’ deid!”’ and that he often repeated it in after life. I never heard it, though I surmise that whenever he uttered it, it must have been in the sense that, only when we are dead shall we be alive enough to understand. His depression of spirits was physical rather than spiritual, for his vision was always lit by faith. Thus in 1869, on a yachting trip, he endured terrible suffering from an abscess in the knee, and wrote this to my mother: ‘Oh, I have gone through some of the folds of the shadow of death since I saw you, but the light has never ceased to shine’ ;1 and again in 1877, one of the most troubled years, he wrote to my mother: ‘“‘ My windows are all darkened—all save the sky-light.” ?

1 See p. 394. 2 See p. 472.

CHAPTER VIII THE DISCIPLE

Tie is good reason for assuming that even in

his first year in Aberdeen, the revolutionary

yeast of George MacDonald’s genius was at work. The Chartist movement, after Fergus O’Connor’s eloquent appeal to the hard-headed Aberdonians, must have been widely discussed in lodging and debating societies. So that when little more than seventeen he was in some form or other asking himself the general question, What need for the Gospel if the elect and no others are predestined to be saved ? But probably it was during his sojourn in the far North that his Calvinistic chains became intolerable. Such a view: seems to have been general at home, and his Uncle James, who adhered to the old teaching with quiet satisfaction, expressed it as his opinion. But my father, conscious that the awakening began long before his eyes were open, would ascribe no such definite period to his conversion.

I well remember (he wrote forty years later) feeling as a child that I did not care for God to love me if he did not love everybody : the kind of love I needed was the love that all men needed, the love that belonged to their nature as the children of the Father, a love he could not give me except he gave it to all men.

His poem The Disciple,? though not actually written till many years later, makes it clear that his fearless perception in student-days of the poetic gospel-story’s supremacy to scholastic doctrine was the incentive to his soul’s growth. This clarity of vision needed only strengthening by his logical intellect to give it

1 Weighed and Wanting (1882), vol. i, p. 47. 2 The Disciple and Other Poems, 1868. 85

86 GEORGE MACDONALD

indomitable fortitude. To see the things of his child- hood as he saw them implied this germinal faculty ; to justify it in manhood’s years accounted for his power of presenting to others in true form and colour the things beheld. The new intimacy with a wider litera- ture, which the great library made his, was, I repeat, food to his powers—“‘ doctrina sed vim promovet insitam ”’ —even if he must suffer much before he could write the final words of that pageant of spiritual moods The Disciple :

The man that feareth, Lord, to doubt,

In that fear doubteth thee.

So distinctly does this poem belong to the final year at King’s College that some of its treasures must be quoted as autobiographical. ~ Quite boy-like he opens with regret, almost shame, that he cannot love the cold saintly heaven proclaimed in pulpit and hymns, though he tries so very hard.

I do not care for singing psalms ; I tire of good men’s talk ;

To me there is no joy in palms Or white robed, solemn walk.

I love to hear the wild winds meet, The wild old winds at night ;

To watch the star-light flash and beat, To wait the thunder-light.

I love all tales of valiant men, Of women good and fair; If I were rich and strong, ah! then I would do something rare. * * * * For as a bird against the pane, I strike, deceived sore ; I know no reason, yet remain Outside it as before. * * * * I sit and gaze from window high Upon the noisy street : No part in this great coil have I, No fate to go and meet.

THE DISCIPLE 87

My books long days have untouched lain ; The lecture hour is slow;

Far other thoughts go through my brain, Than those gowned bosoms know. * * %* *

Old books, new facts, they preach aloud— Their tones like wisdom fall :

I see a face amid the crowd Whose smile were worth them all.

Then comes conviction as to the validity of his own revolt, while yet imprisoned for it:

It is not fear of broken laws, Or judge’s damning word ; It is a lonely pain, because I call and am not heard!

Then at last, when the longing of his heart after God— whose love and beauty the learned dared hardly believe in—is in a measure answered, he rises again in protest, as in Robert Falconer’s memorable speech to his horrified © grandmother, and refuses God’s love if he is singled out from the many : .

Nor claim I thus a place above Thy table’s very foot ;

’Tis only that I love no love That springs not from the root ;

That gives me not my being’s claim ; That says not child to me; - That calls not all men by the name Of children to His knee.

Then once more from this universality of God’s love, the youth protests that he cannot live without the direct personal tenderness of his creator :

No; thou must be a God to me, As if I stood alone;

I such a perfect child to thee As if thou hadst but one.

* * *

88 GEORGE MACDONALD

My story, too, thou knowest, God, Is different from the rest ;

Thou knowest—none but thee—the load With which my heart is pressed.

And the whole argument ends with an appeal that gives us clue to the writer’s mission, whether imagina- tive, or critical, or didactic :

My soul with truth clothe all about, And I shall question free:

The man that feareth, Lord, to doubt, In that fear doubteth thee.

The poem’s piety and mysticism stand in no disagreement with the mental vigour, the dreaminess and poetic lassitude of its writer’s undergraduate days. Yet that it was actually written much later is proved in one section by his speaking of his little daughter, ‘‘ moaning and sore dismayed ”’ in her sleep, and of how she becomes lost in rest when he lays his hand upon her. The eternal problem expressed in the poem was, I repeat, largely worked out for himself in undergraduate days long before he discovered his power in poetic utterance.

A Scottish critic wrote of The Disciple and Other Poems ten years after its first publication in 1868 :

He seems to see into the very soul of the matter and to see it with the eyes of his soul. He does not give us the vigorous flesh and blood reality as Browning would do, showing us its veins like the flesh of the pomegranate when divided, as his wife so beautifully puts it; nor does he give the sentiment of it, in all its delicate shades, as Tennyson would do. He does something quite different from either. He neither intellectualizes nor sentimentalizes. The exquisite : beauty of the poem will suffice to justify the claims of George MacDonald not only to a high, but to the very highest rank as a poet. ... He is a great poet, because he is not like Tennyson or Browning or any other poet in the very least. . . . The region from whence the pure and lovely light of Mr. MacDonald’s poetry comes to us is almost wholly supersensual, and therefore it is most rare and precious. (Scotsman, April 12, 1878.)

1 This final stanza is us amended in the collected Poetical Works, 1893.

CHAPTER I THE WOOL-WORK SLIPPERS

of M.A., but found himself no nearer the choice of

a profession. Failing a medical career, the ministry must have been constantly in his mind. His veneration -and love for the Rev. John Hill, the minister at Huntly and his father’s greatest friend, contributed largely to such a possibility. Yet his love of beauty and all living things, especially his own kind, along with its seeming antagonism to the dogma of the Shorter. Catechism, kept him in sore doubts; and he had not yet cast off its chains, even though his sinews were fast hardening for the task. To some—not his father, I think—this indecision may have seemed temperamental rather than due to his honesty. But the Celtic tendency to drift was never his: no man was ever less given to procrastination. Instinctively he always saw at once the right and wrong of any question ; even if in the present matter he had not the data before him that alone could justify a decision.

Hence it is not surprising that, having that rare gift of teaching which makes learning a delight, he sought a tutorship, if only to get time and opportunity for feeling sure of himself.

The Rev. John Morison, D.D., was then one of the most fashionable preachers in London. The Trevor Chapel in Brompton was built for him. He preached there from 1816 to 1856, and his influence was orthodox and far reaching. Yet another of the strong men that

91

|: April 1845 George MacDonald took his degree

92 GEORGE MACDONALD

Aberdeenshire was producing, he had been in early life apprenticed to a watchmaker in Banff. He was the same age as George MacDonald senior, and I do not doubt that my grandfather, attracted to the young man by his religious ardour, would meet him frequently on his visits to his future brother-in-law, Lieut. George MacKay, possibly while courting the lady who became my grandmother. It may even be that my great- grandmother, Mrs. Charles Edward MacDonald, the enthusiast for missions, had something to do with the lad Morison’s giving up his craft for the ministry. Anyhow, a friendship was struck between the two young men that lasted throughout their lives, though supported chiefly by correspondence. So when young George MacDonald sought a tutorship, it was Dr. Morison who found it for him in the home of his Church-member, Mr. R , living in Fulham. This gentleman and his wife were kind so far as their conception of a University man’s dues instructed them; but the young Scot’s fine physique led the lady of the house to deny him the care necessitated by his frequent ill-health. He had three pupils. There were two little girls besides, whose unruly screaming he found hard to bear. Once when he was reading to the boys, one asked if Jesus Christ wasn’t crucified four times, though the elder brother indignantly insisted it was only twice. He was expected to take them twice on Sunday to the Trevor Chapel. Although he found this irksome enough, he sought the minister’s advice in the matter of his own Church- membership. His great hope, now he was earning money, was to be able to send some home, and pay his small Aberdeen debts.

G.M.D. to his Father. FuLHaAM, [November, 1845.] . . . My greatest difficulty always is ‘“‘ How do I know that my faith is of a lasting kind such as will produce fruits?” ... My error seems to be always searching for faith in place of contemplating

THE WOOL-WORK SLIPPERS 93

the truths of the gospel which produce faith. My spirit is often very confused. My time does not come te much for reading between one thing and another, but I am improving my mind steadily, though it may be slowly. I am reading just now a recent publication, Darwin’s account of a voyage round the world, which, though in many places too scientific for me as yet, I think you would enjoy very much. ... .

The italics are mine; for I almost think we may say this discovery of his “‘error’’ was the foundation of my father’s teaching.1

During the early part of the year 1846 he must already have been often welcomed at Mr. James Powell’s house, The Limes, Upper Clapton, to which, as has already been told, he was introduced by his Cousin Helen, now the wife of Alexander Powell. For in June I find his first extant letter to Miss Louisa Powell, already addressing her by her Christian name and signing himself ‘“ Your affectionate cousin.” From this time onwards the increasing freedom of his pen, the lessening tendency to introspection, and a surer hope are very evident. No one but himself ever knew © in what way his prayers were answered, or whose the hand that unconsciously upheld him. This letter was written two years and four months before they were formally engaged. |

As an indication of his dawning happiness and of his invariable industry, whether of hand, mind or spirit—a man of action I repeat, quite as definitely as he was one who could wait patiently—I may here tell of a pair of slippers he made at this time for his mother.’ My Aunt Jeanie, Mrs. Crawford Noble, tells me that she remembers them perfectly: ‘they were in cross- stitch, representing acorns and leaves in shades of green with a scarlet grounding. His mother had them made up, but never wore them: they were too precious.” Berlin wool-work was then coming into fashion with

1 Indeed, I have throughout ventured to italicize certain notable

passages in the letters. 3 : 2 He never spoke or thought of that loving and wise woman as step-

mother.

94 GEORGE MACDONALD

young ladies, and we can easily surmise whose fingers taught that young man his use of the needle. My mother had most beautiful hands and the finest eyes I ever saw.

G.M.D. to his Step-mother.

Lonpon, June 15, 1846. My DEAREST MOTHER,

Will you accept of some of my work? You will excuse faults, seeing it is my first attempt. I should have got them made up, but both my time and purse were very limited, and I was not sure that they would fit you. I can sew very well now—always mend my own clothes—use my thimble—a nice silver one 1—like a lady. I have patched my trousers two or three times—an accom- plishment I have attained since I came to England, and a most useful one I find it to be! I don’t know when I heard a word of little Jeanie. Tell me about her when you write. . . . God is very good to me. Oh! I was so far from’ him two or three years ago, and I trust I am always coming nearer to him now.

I would like to quote many of my mother’s letters written in these early days. But they are very ordinary —like primroses and hedge-roses and shy violets and quiet pools of blue-bells—just ordinary. We have all memories, besides some gift of imagination. So I will, for the most part, leave them where they lie. But here is one of the many preserved by my father, dated July 20, 1846, showing in what manner he would write to his “ Cousin Louisa,”’ and how her doings and well- being had become so important to him. Moreover, it bears upon future events in a way that will become obvious. He is urging her not to lose interest in her scrap-book and sends her a poem which he had already written; “I am not sure if I have given it to Helen, but I intended doing so.” They are, by the way, better than anything he ever did for that cousin so far as records go; they are not to be found in her book :

? An earlier letter to Miss Louisa Powell apologizes for having in-

advertently carried off her thimble. I do not doubt that a reply-note instructed him to keep it if it would be of any service.

THE WOOL-WORK SLIPPERS 95

The mysterious night, When but a tip of the low hornéd moon Looks o’er the crest of a peaked cloudy height, Edging it with a glory—fading soon : A few pale stars are through the cloud-rifts strewn, - And the low wind is running to and fro, Like a forsaken child, that knows not where to go.

O to have the silence of such a night round me once more!

I am, my dear Louisa, Your affectionate cousin, GEORGE.

A comment written by Louisa Powell at the foot of this letter brings her close to any reader’s heart, and not a whit further from his reverence. “‘ My Dear, my Dearest !”’ she writes, while her penmanship breaks out into little spasmodic sprays and stars of decorative anguish, ‘‘ZI am an overgrown baby with manners like a bear vexed!”

Among the many scraps of verse, published or not, scattered through my father’s promiscuous manuscripts, I find these lines without emendation and with their date subscribed: |

Time dieth ever, Is ever born ;

On the footsteps of night So treadeth the morn—

Shadow and brightness, Death and birth,

Chasing each other O’er the round earth.

But the Spirit of Time From his tomb is springing. The dust of the world From his pinions flinging.

Ever renewing His glorious youth, Seattering around him The dew of truth, January 1847.

CHAPTER II THE FAMILY OF JAMES POWELL

hold into which George MacDonald was wel- comed by James Powell and his wife, their sons and daughters. Thanks to many letters of my parents to one another as well as to and from other members of the family, together with reminiscences! set down for me by my Aunt Angela, Mrs. Francis, I can give some impression of the enlightening influence George MacDonald brought to this large family, as well as of what their lavish hospitality did for him during the period 1847-51, before he married Miss Louisa Powell. Concerning my grandfather’s family no very exact particulars are forthcoming. His eldest grandson, Sir Leonard Powell, advises me that our ancestors were Knights of the Shire in Wales, and until four or five generations ago were buried in Abergavenny Church- yard. When the standing army was first inaugurated in England in 1645 these knights, who had been endowed with land for the support of the soldiers required of

Gratin must be told of the English house-

1 She prefaces her reminiscences with the “Spring Song” of her subject : ** Days of old, Ye are not dead, though gone from me; Ye are not cold, But like the summer-birds fled o’er some sea.

**The sun brings back the swallows fast O’er the sea; When he cometh at the last, The days of old come back to me.” (Poetical Works, vol. i, p. 339.) 96

exnoemerr:

og :

CHARLOTTE POWELL MRS. ALEXANDER POWELL (NEE HELEN MACKAY), age

about 23

JAMES POWELL, age 86 MRS. JAMES POWELL

THE FAMILY OF JAMES POWELL 97

them, were divested of all such real estate; and it went back either to the Crown or to the superior landlord. A certain Thomas Powell, one of these impoverished individuals, came to London with, my mother used to say, the half-crown so essential to mercantile success in his pouch, and started a leather business in Whitecross Street, E.C. This expanded so greatly that his successors, Messrs. T. J. & T. Powell, would transact every sort of business connected with the leather trade, importing tanning materials and hides from all parts of the world, exporting again to the Continent and selling to manufacturers or advancing money to tanners. Originally, my grandfather lived -upon the business premises, my mother being born in Whitecross Street, ‘“‘ within sound of Bow-Bells,” she would say. The firm took first rank in the leather trade, removing to 36 Lime Street and latterly to London Bridge. The whole family were pro- foundly religious and all, at any rate of the later generations, Nonconformist.!

The young tutor just graduated from Aberdeen paid frequent visits to his Cousin Helen, by this time married to Alexander Powell, at Stamford Grove, Upper Clapton. Unquestionably not robust in health and much in need, I take it, of ordinary sympathy and kindness, he was always welcomed by them. Mrs. Alexander, it will be remembered, upon her introduction to the family in 1844, had taken by storm the very hearts of this con- ventional and chapel-disciplined family; and some of the girls at least must have been, to judge from their characters, restless for fresh influences. Helen MacKay was a great beauty. Her charm of manner, sweet- ness of smile, the tenderness of her voice in speech and song, her captivating eyes, bewitched these six

1 The original Thomas Powell was well known as a lay preacher of terrible long sermons, and was sometimes inaudible. Once a sailor at the back of the chapel, it is recorded, unable to hear him, called out in a voice that might have shamed the stormy waves themselves, “I say,

if this is a secret, keep it to yourself,’ and upset the congregation, if not the preacher. 7

98 GEORGE MACDONALD

sedate, if handsome and accomplished, young ladies: Louisa almost worshipped her, and her brother Alexander went crazy about her beauty. Nor was she slow to hint a delightful and proprietary right in her Cousin George of whom she expected great things for the world’s uplifting. To-day we hardly realize how large a factor in daily life were matters of religion at that time, and how important was correctitude upon doctrinal points. Thus one of the Misses Powell deferred for many months accepting her lover until he could formulate satisfactorily his views on the Atonement : which at last, and most fortunately for the world, he contrived to do. But now Helen MacKay, with facile suggestions of having a wider outlook than the Misses Powell’s eyes had ever dared—suggestions that set at least one of them wondering how much this cousin from Aberdeen had contributed to such eye-opening— and yet altogether orthodox and devout in her observ- ances, had prepared the way for George MacDonald’s welcome. She had been married already a year when she took him to her father-in-law’s house, The Limes, an old Georgian house, with good stabling and a three-acre garden, whose tea-roses I still remember with rapture as one morning my grandfather held a dew-laden bunch of them to my four-year-old nose as I sat hungry for my breakfast.

Louisa was away from home when George first came ; but her sister Angela—Annie, she was named—wrote that Helen’s cousin would “explain everything that puzzled her and make her life happy!’ She adds in her reminiscences :

He showed me new life in everything, understood me as an equal. This was very wonderful to me, as all my life I had been the fool of the family for my inability to spell and commit to memory. Great was my astonishment when he wished me to learn mathematics and began himself to teach me.

Although my Aunt Angela could never spell better than an average ten-year-old child, she and my mother

THE FAMILY OF JAMES POWELL 99

excelled perhaps their more brilliant sisters in originality. And now George MacDonald discovered to them the great writers in place of ‘‘ hymns for Sundays and pretty bits for weekdays.” He read first to them Scott’s Marmion, and then Wordsworth, opening their eyes to the world that had been always about them. Then came Tennyson’s early poems and In Memoriam. In 1845 Browning’s Saul appeared, and this also he read to them. The smallest of their doings interested him ; and my aunt says:

Once when I was ill he came to see me in the old schoolroom, because I was naughty and would not take my castor oil. He had not talked to me for many minutes before I gulped it down without a murmur, and was rewarded next day with a box of sugar-candy— a rare luxury at that time.

The rebellious child could not have been less than seventeen !

But some account must be given of these six girls, to three of whom he was so noble a being that they swallowed Browning and physic with equal obedience— if differing appreciation. They were congregational, quite orthodox, and not more narrow-minded than a respectable and well-to-do city merchant’s family would be. Their mother was a tender-hearted lady, the refuge and help of all her children; for they had individualities of character too strong to be always comfortable with one another in spite of an enthusiastic admiration for each other’s special merits. Louisa and Angela paid the penalty of their gifts in often resenting and even ridiculing the correct deportment of their two elder sisters. The eldest, Charlotte, who afterwards married Professor Godwin, George Mac- Donald’s teacher at Highbury College, certainly was a highly gifted woman. The others looked up to her so much that there was no jealousy of their father’s favouring of her beyond her sisters. The mother’s frail health—she had lost five children, having had thirteen in all—gave this daughter much responsibility.

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She even had more expensive masters than the others. Her pure soprano voice was the joy of the home and all its guests. In her rendering of “ Rejoice greatly ”’ and ‘“‘He was despised’”’ in the Messiah, it was said that only Clara Novello could surpass her. Then her power of describing anything she had seen, her facile mimicry and portrayal of character made a great favourite of her. Yet she was a very active member of the Society for converting Roman Catholics, and belonged to several other missions. Her exactions in matters of propriety invited the ridicule of Louisa and Angela, in which the youngest sister Carrie, who was at this time but fourteen, would ardently sympathize.

The next in the family was Alexander, who, like his father, was an excellent hand at his carpenter’s bench. He had much of his sisters’ eccentricity of character, and, I believe, his practical jokes of a rather alarming nature, and a tendency to roughness in fun hard to bear by a hyper-sensitive, hysterical wife, made her married life difficult at times. They had no children. But he had been an ardent lover. It was in 1840 that alarm was first felt concerning the Chartist movement, and in London an increase of crime, especially burglary, was attributed to political sources. Alexander Powell and his cousin, Edward Sharman, were enrolled as special constables, and secured the right to patrol that region of St. John’s Wood where the Abbey Road lies, in which was the school where Helen MacKay was being finished. The two young officials called at the house in the exercise of their duties and asked for the Head Mistress. Informing her that they had been instructed to pay her school very particular attention, they desired, for reasons they would not particularize for fear of unduly alarming the ladies, to search the school premises for suspected burglars. Permission was eagerly accorded; but whether their effrontery was rewarded either by the capture of any miscreant, or by a glance from a pair of irresistibly fascinating eyes, history has no record. Anyhow, we see in Alexander

THE FAMILY OF JAMES POWELL 101

Powell the spirit of his sister Louisa who used to delight her children with wonderful stories of her innocent escapades at school, which generally ended in her admiring schoolfellows being reprimanded, but only herself punished. At the same time she would make us realize what a wonderful woman her mistress, Mrs. Laurie of Reading, had been, and how much she owed to her loving discipline.

Phoebe followed. Her characteristic was a genius for philanthropy so dominant that she could ignore all the pungent criticisms of her. family. She was even negligent about her dress, if to make herself tidy ' before going to chapel would interfere with her pre- paratory prayers: ‘‘so that at the last moment she would rush on her bonnet over her beautiful, untidy hair and her shawl all askew, caring nothing for what people said.” She was scientific in her tastes and particularly interested in Natural History, besides being the best water-colour painter of them all. Her fine character was shown in the work she did for the Irish Famine. ‘Long before Gladstone took up Ireland,”’ says my Aunt Angela, ‘‘ Phoebe’s heart was indignant at England’s treatment of that sore, ill-used country.” When the famine broke out in 1845, her personal self-denial did much to convince visitors to The Limes of the urgency; and she collected a great deal of money for the cause. Her intimacy with destitution at home was quite as keen, and she would take her sisters and young-men friends as far as Bethnal Green, right into the haunts of thieves and worse, to compel their interest: and that in days before “slumming”? had become respectable, or even fashionable.

These two elder sisters, much, it may be safely presumed, as they admired George MacDonald, had no need of the help he gave Louisa, Angela and Carrie. Louisa, born November 5, 1822, was to my own eyes— and I scorn to have prejudices in treating of so delicate a matter—unquestionably the pick of that remarkable

102 GEORGE MACDONALD

bunch of sisters; and my Aunt Angela agreed with me: ‘‘The home was always dull when Louisa was away: she was the gay influence. Like the twinkle of her wonderful eyes, she brightened all around her; they could always and at once see the ridiculous in everyone and every situation.”” Humbug was to her all through her life so absurd and funny that one wonders why it ever made her angry. Either her sense of the ridiculous or her honesty prevented her joining their Church till much older than was customary. When at last she consented to it, along with her young sister Flora, my aunt tells how two grave old deacons came to ask them questions and to pray with them. One was an undertaker, very old and fat. He asked Flora whether she “wrestled in prayer.” Whereat Louisa could but half conceal her naughty delight; for she pictured this sister, who shared her bedroom, so often fast asleep when kneeling at her bedside.

Louisa was the smallest of the family, slim and perfectly proportioned. Indeed, I think she was well aware of her pretty figure. My sisters assure me she never wore stays; yet I find an envelope containing five specimens of doggerel verse, written by her brothers and sisters in gentle ridicule of her small waist. Here is her eldest sister’s :

List ye who would a marvel hear, Whilst I a story tell;

Come look upon this waist so dear, And mark this wonder well.

A little waist it always was, A man might well it span; But now ’tis smaller than it was: A child I’m sure now can!

Yet more this flesh and skin surround Than ere they did before:

Of old one heart alone was found Now two are there—Oh, Lor!

THE FAMILY OF JAMES POWELL 103

Another seems to match the handwriting of Miss Pheebe :

You know that our Lou has grown graceful and slender; Like the breeze on the aspen, a zephyr may bend her!

Is it squeezing and pulling, and tugging and pressing

With steel and with whalebone, with jaen and with lacing ? Oh, no! but give ear and the reason I’ll tell

Why a finger and thumb her waist may span well :

She has lost her large heart, and there’s nothing within But back-bone and ribs, nerves, muscle and skin.

The other specimens hardly reach the same literary excellence, though two seem to be Angela’s and Carrie’s. They are dated May 27, 1850, a month before Mrs. James Powell’s death and ten months before my father and mother were married.

George was the next—May 12, 1824. He was the pet of his mother, and always held up to Louisa as a model for her to copy. Not only was he a very pretty child—and here again in contrast with Louisa, who was. perhaps in her young days the least good looking of the family—but he would incite her to commit naughty acts, such as pulling an old gentleman’s hair in the pew in front of their own—but only to settle the question as to whether he wore a wig. He didn’t; and the little girl had to pay the price for her admirable forti- tude. If George Powell was suspicious of the adopted cousin George MacDonald’s orthodoxy, he was the very best of brothers when anyone was in trouble; and he adored his sister Angela in particular. Indeed, he was also the best of uncles to several nephews, one at least of whom could hardly have completed his medical studies without a hospitality generously bestowed.

Angela was born on December 15, 1826. She became her mother’s “little needle-woman.’’ Because she spelled so badly, her parents had some doubt of her intelligence. But after George MacDonald found her surprisingly receptive of any imaginative appeal to

104 GEORGE MACDONALD

her understanding, no one any more questioned her abilities.

Florentia (born August 18, 1830) was the quietest of all, the most submissive perhaps. Chief among her gifts was her piano-playing. She loved warmly and got much petting in return.

Caroline (December 11, 1832) the youngest, was always delicate in health, but became perhaps the dearest of all these sisters in her sympathy with my parents and ministrations to their family. Of all our aunts we loved her best in our young days.

The family life is interesting to look back upon. All well-educated, even judged by the standards of to-day, no excessive brain-work spoiled them for their normal duties in life. Excluding the youngest, they all married, and very happily. Excepting Mrs. Godwin, they had families; Louisa, George, and Flora very large ones. Besides being unusually musical, all the girls as well as Alexander showed pronounced histrionic gifts, which they bequeathed to many of their children. They would necessarily have felt that all play-acting was wrong; but I think my father, who even then went occasionally to the theatre, must have changed their views. Anyhow, they contented themselves with charades, then a fashionable amuse- ment which gave wide scope to their talents.

Even more important, however, in the domestic happiness was my grandfather’s excellent taste in music. Himself an accomplished violinist, he had regular quartette parties at The Limes, where none but classical music was ever played. Erard, the piano manufacturer, the Novellos, Clara Macirone—a favourite pupil of Mendelssohn, and the Misses Powell’s teacher of the piano—numbered among their guests. Mr. Powell, a severe disciplinarian, did not allow dance-music on

1 These dates are got from the books of the Old Gravel Pits Meeting House, where on January 26, 1836, Louisa, George Holt, Florentia, and Caroline Chase were baptized. The delay suggests that my grandparents did not favour infant baptism.

THE FAMILY OF JAMES POWELL 105

his pianos, so that dancing formed no part of their pleasures.

He himself was a good handicraftsman, whether at his carpenter’s bench or bookbinder’s press, and would be terribly severe with all idleness. Industry and a generous economy ruled the house.

Less entertaining, I presume, were the dinner parties, which sometimes included renowned ministers of the day. My Aunt Angela remembered one such guest declaring, a propos of the Atonement, that if Jesus Christ had been born one day and crucified the next, His work for the world had been accomplished.?

It is small wonder if young George MacDonald seemed to these young ladies the very model of a poet.

He came (wrote my Aunt Angela, in her enthusiastic way) not a conventional youth, with polite smooth talk, but like a prophet of

1 Often to the astonishment of his guests, my grandfather, after a formal dinner, would lightly tap the table, and give the keynote, when the family would sing a thanksgiving in exquisite harmeny. In later years it must have charmed his old heart, when he gathered his grand- chicks around his table at Christmas, to hear their little voices piping the sweet air and harmony he had made that their fathers and mothers might sing Milton’s words :

**Let us with a gladsome mind Praise the Lord, for he is kind: For his mercies aye endure Ever faithful, ever sure.

** All things living he doth feed, His full hand supplies our need: For his mercies aye endure Ever faithful, ever sure.” Etc.

One of those grandsons will never forget, though he himself is now old and deaf, how, after trying to give the little boy a preliminary lesson on the violin, the old man, with a deep sigh, replaced it in the case saying he was too old and deaf even for that.

2 In further illustration of that day’s orthoxody, I may tell how an aunt of my mother, Miss Eliza Sharman, used to vow she could never lie comfortable in bed if she might not believe in hellfire and everlasting pains! On the other hand, a racy story used to be current in the family of a brother of my grandmother’s, Mark Sharman, who lived at Welling- borough. One day he was telling at his table of an infant who had died in the night. ‘Mr. Sharman,” asked a guest, “I hope the poor thing was christened ?”’ ‘‘ Well, ma’am, no,” he replied; ‘‘ the parson couldn’t get his breeches on fast enough, and the puling little sinner went to hell.”’

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old. Long before we thought of him as having any religious message to us, gradually we found he knew about everything and could put any difficulty right, be it to answer “Is there a God ?”’ or “ What is poetry ?”’ or “‘ What about ghosts or fairies ? ”’

Nor must we forget the swallowing of physic.?

Yet while my aunt relates how they came to realize the poverty of their rigid dogmas, we must not lose sight of the sweetness and tenderness of this unusual family in their daily life. What with the father’s music and the gentleness of the mother’s spirit throughout her long suffering, no unintelligible dogmas could harm the innate simplicity of their religious thoughts. In the case of my mother, this shines in all her letters to my father ; and I do not see that the spiritual tone of them is in any way altered or improved when her freedom of thought became assimilated to his own. Her modes of expression became more modern no doubt; but this was due to mental changes rather than to any modification of the great truths that lie behind the most repellant of ecclesiastic dogmas: the illumination of which truths, not their abolition, was the life-work of George MacDonald.

1 A tragi-comic thing happened to this ardent girl Angela when she was nineteen: her aunt took her into her bedroom one day and catechized her, the result being that the next day she made a new will, omitting the name of Angela Powell. She had originally left to this favourite niece all her books of prayer and meditation and her guides to Heaven, but now bequeathed them, along with her wardrobe, her poke-bonnets and crinolines, to the heathen.

It was for Angela—perhaps as a consolation for some such disapproval— that George MacDonald wrote the poem beginning: e

** Were I a skilful painter, My pencil, not my pen, Should try to teach thee hope and fear, And who would blame me then ? (Poetical Works, vol. ii, p. 10.)

CHAPTER III THE NEW OUTLOOK

HE days of George MacDonald’s tutorship brought

him much mental conflict and discipline. Teach-

ing dull, spoiled children, and propitiating a resentful mother none too hospitably inclined, were spiritual sackcloth to the poor and sensitive young Scot. His letters to his father reveal this to the full, even though he never indulges in incrimination or self- pity, rather blaming his own irritability of temper. He prefers to discuss with his father the principles of Church government, and wishes “ our churches were like the primitive ones in more than the mere theory.” He would “rather be of no sect than a sectarian.” He describes Dr. Morrison’s sermons, even questioning his policy and taste in singling out individuals of his congregation for public reproof. Then he has destitute friends in London who get every penny he can spare from his narrow earnings, and asks from his father oatmeal for them; or, on the other hand, ten shillings from his employer for the famine-stricken Highlanders. He sends accounts home of every penny spent, and fears his father will hardly understand how the money flies in London, if only in shoe-leather.

In reading of George’s satisfaction over his brother Alec joining the Church at home, it is interesting to compare his conventional phraseology with his later imaginative freedom of expression.

In several letters he discusses his increasing hope of being a minister, though constantly feeling and stating

his unfitness. His candour with his father is entirely 107

108 GEORGE MACDONALD

consistent with his open-mindedness to his own sons in later days, and indeed to all who sought his help. But as to a proposal to study at a theological college, he will decide nothing before seeing his father.

G.M.D. to his Father.

FuLHAM, [undated].

. . . I did not wish you to understand me as having finally made up my mind as to the ministry. ’Tis true this feeling has been gradually gaining ground on me. What a mercy I was not allowed to follow out Chemistry! But, on the other hand, I fear myself— I have so much vanity, so much pride . . . I have not prayed much about it, for it has seemed so far in the distance, as if it was scarcely time to think of it yet. ... I love my Bible more—I am always finding out something new in it. All my teaching in youth seems useless to me. I must get it all from the Bible again. .. . If the gospel of Jesus be not true, I can only pray my maker to annihilate me, for nothing else is worth living for; and if that be true, every- thing in the universe is glorious, except sin. . . . One of my greatest difficulties in consenting to think of religion was that I thought I should have to give up my beautiful thoughts and my love for the things God had made. But I find that the happiness springing from all things not in themselves sinful is much increased by religion. God is the God of the beautiful, Religion the love of the Beautiful, and Heaven the home of the Beautiful, Nature is tenfold brighter in the sun of Righteousness, and my love of Nature is more intense since I became a Christian—if indeed I am one. God has not given me such thoughts and forbidden me to enjoy them... .

To answer another question. I have smoked a good deal since I came to London, though not much lately. When I am well it is a great enjoyment to me. Mr. R is a smoker. He gave me a beautiful pipe. But I should not have much right to claim much love for you, if I would not give it up at your request. I was almost sorry it was not a greater sacrifice. And yet I would not have you think it no sacrifice. So I promise you never in this world to smoke again. That is settled now.!

I should have much to say to you if I were with you, and many a long conversation I trust we may have before very long. May I never cause you a thought of pain, as I have so often done in years that are past. . . . Give my love to Johnny ; to grandmama too. .. .

* He did not smoke again till his visit to Huntly in 1855, when his father gave him a cigar, the consequence being confessed in a letter to my mother.

THE NEW OUTLOOK 109

Another letter belonging to this year is even more interesting. Though it reads strangely to modern minds, the views expressed did not ever, I think, undergo much change throughout my father’s life. It is written to his uncle, a man of astute ability and with considerable literary gifts:

G.M.D. to James MacDonald, Huntly.

LoNnpDOoN, May 22, 1847. My VERY DEAR UNCLE,

I called on Dr. Adams, but had again the misfortune to find that he was out. I do not think I am right to use the word misfortune, for the conviction is, I think, growing upon me that the smallest events are ordered for us, while yet in perfect consistency with the ordinary course of cause and effect inthe world. Iam strongly inclined to think that whatever has a moral effect of any kind on our minds, God manages for us—and even much more than this. How far the events of those who do not at all seek to serve Him are con- trolled by him, in regard to these individuals personally, is a question about which I have no opinion at all—at least not a settled one. Perhaps it would be presumption to form one on such a subject... . |

Your very affectionate nephew, GEORGE.

CHAPTER IV BETROTHAL

ATE in the Spring of 1848 George MacDonald relinquished happily his tutorship. The follow- ing letter was written after his resignation was

determined upon:

G.M.D. to Miss Louisa Powell.

FuLHAM, [undated].

. . . The difficulties with which I told you I was surrounded are not the results of my situation. However ill I may bear them at times, I regard my trials here as helps, not hindrances. But my difficulties are those which a heart far from God must feel, even when the hand of the Heavenly Father is leading it back to himself. It seems a wonder that he can bear with me.

What is it that is the principal cause of everyone’s unhappiness who is not a Christian? It is the want of enough to love. We are made for love—and in vain we strive to pour forth the streams of our affection by the narrow channels which the world can give 1— and well is it if, stagnated in our hearts, they turn not to bitterness. The religion of Jesus Christ is intended to bring us back to our real natural condition: for all the world is in an unnatural state. This will give us that to love which alone can satisfy our loving—which alone, as we climb each successive height, can show us another yet

1 These words call to mind some of later years:

**I love thee, Lord, for very greed of love— Not of the precious streams that towards me move, But of the indwelling, outgoing, fountain store: Than mine, oh, many an ignorant heart loves more: Therefore the more, with Mary at thy feet, I must sit worshipping—that, in my core, Thy words may fan to a flame the low primeval heat.” (The Diary of an Old Soul, March 18th.) 110

BETROTHAL 111

higher and farther off—so that, as our powers of loving expand the object of loving grows in all those glories which excite our love and ~ yet make it long for more.

_He had been for the last year supported in his difficulties by the hope of visiting his home that summer. And now the step became imperative because of the need to talk to his father of these two things: he must ask advice and help for the proposed theological studies in London; he must get approval for his hope of securing a certain adorable young lady for his wife. My father once told me that he had never asked his father for anything, as boy or man, but it was given. The fact revealed to me the perfection of their unity. Hence