The imagination, and other essays

Introduction

I WAS first induced to read George MacDonald by the late Rev. Dr. Gannett, who said that he had found more in him and got more from him than in or from any author whose name belonged to the current literature of the day. This commendation on so high and grave authority led me to make acquaintance with him, and I can cordially second the testimony of my venerable friend; yet not because I underrate other men who are justly favorites in the reading world, but because MacDonald is a class by himself, and as such, holds in his own vein, and m minds receptive of his influence, a sole place ; while on other Hnes of thought and sentiment, attention and interest are more or less divided and distributed.

He is best known by his novels, and they furnish the most genuine test of the quality and strength of his intellectual fibre. As stories, they are by no means faultless. They often have ill-constructed plots, awkward denouements, unnatural incidents, and impossible characters ; and the conversations, though never dull, are abnormally prolix, and when the person speaking can be supposed to have a provincial dialect, its vocabulary is aired to the reader's utter weariness. Yet with all these drawbacks MacDonald clenches the heart and soul of his reader with an iron grasp ; the interest, strong at the outset, grows with every chapter; the

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personages brought upon the stage seem, if not our near kindred, at least our next-door neighbors, and we part from them as from old acquaintance, — from some of them as from very dear friends. Yet the power thus exerted, though the story is its vehicle, is independent of the story. It is in the man himself, and in the medium through which he beholds the world and its Creator, — things seen and things unseen. He is preeminently realistic ; not in the material, but in the spiritual sense of the word. He looks directly and always into the soul of things, and that soul is to him the immanent God.

The Divine omnipresence, as a dogma, we all believe; with him it is more than a belief, — a perception, a face-to-face communion. We are afraid to associate the Divine image with paltry things, with every-day affairs, with trivial needs, vexations and enjoyments ; to him the least things seem great, because he sees God in them. In like manner he brings us, as it were, into the interior presence of the human beings that he portrays; gives us the inmost physiology of emotion, purpose, will, self-congratulation, penitence, remorse ; shows us his personages, not as they look or talk for the eye or ear of the outside world, but as in lluii moments of deepest introspection they know themselves to be. In religion, he deals not with dogmas or their verbal drapery, but with the actual relations of beings which, in his apprehension, are not typified, but literally described by the terms of the closest and tenderest

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human kindred as applied to God and man, and to man and man. It is in accordance with this tone of representation that duty, conscience, obligation, sin, in fine, all ethical concepts, are treated not as matters of formal law and statute, but as phases of the human soul turned to or averted from the present God.

The same characteristics mark his sermons and religious essays, which are a handling of realities, and not of their symbols. His words have a transparency which belongs to very few writers of any age. One looks through them, instead of seeing things by means of them. His literary criticisms have a similar directness and translucency. They manifest keen insight rather than appreciation. He does not look at his author as from a distance, but rather for the time assumes his personality, thinks and feels with him, and almost in him.

With these traits MacDonald might seem better furnished as an essayist than as a novel-writer, and I certainly should say so were I not more than delighted with his novels. But as an essayist he would have won distinguished reputation, had he not eclipsed himself in this department by his eminent success in another. I have before me two volumes of his essays, one on The Miracles of our Lord, the other — England's Anizphon — on English religious poetry, either of which would have given a new writer a very high place in the esteem of the best minds. In the former of these specially, are all th« elements of thought and feeling

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which give character to his novels, — the near approach to sacred verities, the vivid sense of their reality, and their familiar presentation with a loving tenderness that is more than reverence.

What has been said may in a good measure describe the book now offered to the American public. Its subjects are various, and they show the several aspects o^ the author's genius; but in all of them the reader is brought into the closest relation with the author, and he, in a sense almost peculiar to him, literally, rather than metaphorically, "enters into" his subject. But no more needs to be said ; he can best speak for himself.

This volume is a reprint of the English edition, with the exception of the title of the book and the title of the last Essay or Sermon ; and the less than a page of Preface in the English edition is wholly taken up in finding fault with those two titles. The name of the book is Orts; but the author says that since it was irrevocably printed, he has doubted its fitness. There can be no reasonable doubt of its unfitness, and though not by my advice, it is with my hearty approval that the author's better second thoughts have been respected by the American publishers. The last Sermon is in the English edition entitled The Christian Ministering, which the author says was a mistake and an oversight, True Greatness being the substitute which he himself suggests.

A. P. Peabody.

Cambridge, March 9, 1883.

Contents

The Imagination: its Functions and its Culture i A Sketch of Individual Development ... 43 St. George's Day, 1564 ^ ^JidfU^eAc^ , . 77 The Art of Shakspare, as revealed by himself 141

On Polish i8a

Browning's "Christmas Eve" 195