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George Macdonald and the Regenerated Imagination

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George Macdonald and the Regenerated Imagination When Seeing is More Than Seeing: George MacDonald and the Regenerated Imagination The imagination…can present us with new thought-forms – new, that is, as revelations of thought. It has created none of the material that goes to make these forms. Nor does it work upon raw material. But it takes forms already existing, and gathers them about a thought so much higher than they, that it can group and subordinate and harmonize them into a whole which shall represent, unveil that thought. (George MacDonald, “The Imagination: Its Function and Its Culture”, in A Dish of Orts)1 We can descend with the mind into the heart most easily through the imagination…[T]he imagination, like all our faculties, has participated in the Fall. But just as we can believe that God can take our reason (fallen as it is) and sanctify it and use it for good purposes, so we believe he can sanctify the imagination and use it for his good purposes. (Richard Foster, Celebration of Discipline)2 I. Most have heard the story: of Jack Lewis, a young student at Oxford and an avowed atheist, who opened a copy of MacDonald’s Phantastes and found himself transfixed by what he read, later commenting that the book served to “convert, even…baptise” his “imagination”.3 Certainly, it would not be for some time after this event that Lewis would be fully converted, and most know that that other famous fantasy writer, J.R.R. Tolkien, would play an instrumental part in the final conversion process. Lewis’ words here about MacDonald, however, deserve some attention, even if they are quoted more often than 1 Quoted in Leland Ryken (ed.), The Christian Imagination: The Practice of Faith in Literature and Writing, Colorado Springs: Shaw, 2002, p. 101. 2 Richard Foster, A Celebration of Discipline, London: Hodder, 2008, pp. 29-30. 3 C.S. Lewis, “Preface”, in George MacDonald: An Anthology, London: HarperOne, 2001, xxxviii. MacDonald himself and have caused many MacDonald critics to want to distance his work from Lewis’ appraisal of it.4 For, despite these issues, they express something of deep significance about how MacDonald – that writer both so clearly a man of his age yet so deeply and subtly resistant to its spirit – engaged with the scientific rationalism of the nineteenth century. He did not take to the Socratic Club with apologetic papers the way that Lewis would; nor did he cut through the illogic and bias of its assumptions like G.K. Chesterton would. No, his weapon to defeat rationalism was an utterly different one altogether. George MacDonald fought with his imagination. II. The Age of Rationalism is probably best typified in the magnificent opening to Charles Dickens’ Hard Times, with its famous soliloquy of Mr Thomas Gradgrind: “Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!”5 In an age where facts were given greatest primacy, and where subjective human experience was seen as being of lesser value to that which could be empirically proven, it is easy enough to see why some of its greatest writers should have rebelled. After all, writers trade in imagination, and there is little doubt that, for Dickens at least, a world which only values facts and ridicules emotion, imagination or aesthetics is no fun at all – certainly not for a writer, but, as Hard Times demonstrates powerful, not even for its everyday residents. The central drama, after all, of the novel is one of a man being forced to reckon with his own failures, in spite of all his factual knowledge: failure as a father, as an educator, and as a man. 4 One highly comprehensive critique of this over-alignment of MacDonald with Lewis is found in John Pennington’s “‘Wolff’ in Sheep’s Clothing”, in Roderick McGillis (ed.), George MacDonald: Literary Heritage and Heirs, Wayne, Pa.: Zossima Press, 2008, pp. 239-255. 5 Charles Dickens, Hard Times, Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1869, p. 7. John Pennington, in his comparative analysis of Dickens and MacDonald, begins with these words of Dickens’ which capture well his response to the age: In an utilitarian age…it is a matter of grave importance that Fairy tales should be respected…To preserve them in their usefulness, they must be as much preserved in their simplicity, and purity, and innocent extravagance, as if they were actual fact.6 In this sense, our definition of fact is challenged, broadened even. There is a truth to what Dickens terms “Fairy tales” that must be preserved for the sake of the “utilitarian age”, even if that truth is neither literal nor scientific. And what is that truth? It is surely one which cuts to the heart of the very age which resoundingly rejects it. III. I first met MacDonald not through Lewis’ writing on him but in the final few pages of a Puffin Classic book I was reading. I do not remember which book it was; all I remember is that I was looking, as was my habit then, through the “Also in Puffin Classics” pages which told me of other books that I would, no doubt, enjoy. There was a book listed on those pages called At the Back of the North Wind. The name intrigued me, though I knew little or nothing about the novel itself. I remembered the name and planned to read it one day. Later, I was looking through another book which, in many ways, represented a treasure trove of possible reading. My parents had a volume on their shelves called Honey For a Child’s Heart. It was, I remember, a Christian book about instilling a love of reading in your children. In its final pages it had a list of recommended books for children, broken up into different topics and sub-categories. One, called something like, “Teaching your children to love God”, listed three books by MacDonald: The Princess and the Goblin, The Princess and Curdie and that other one I had noticed before, At the Back of the North Wind. I didn’t like the sound of the Princess books (they sounded too “girly”; besides, I was fairly sure my parents would not let me read a book about 6 Dickens, “Frauds on Fairies”, cited in John Pennington, “From Fact to Fantasy in Victorian Fiction”, in Extrapolation, Vol. 38, No. 3, 1997, p. 2000. goblins, even if it was Christian), but I felt reinforced in my wish to read At the Back of the North Wind. Not long after, I ordered it in from a nearby library. It had a wonderfully mysterious picture on its cover: all ice and snow, and, I remember, a beautiful woman who seemed to be the wind, and a young boy standing with her. I don’t think I read it at the time, not in full. For all my love of reading, I spent more time thinking about all the books I wanted to read than I did actually reading them. My attention span with books was short and easily stolen by the next Puffin Classic that caught my eye. I do remember, however, that the main character was a boy called Diamond (what a strange name). I also remember that, if the story had a clear God character (and surely it had to, like Aslan was in the Narnia books?), then it was the North Wind, who was, confusingly, a woman. (Having since read most of MacDonald’s fantasy stories, I know that his God characters almost always are women, a fact that remains strange and confusing for many.) I put it aside, distracted by something else, and would not come back to it until I was nearly twenty-one. One detail, however, stayed in my mind quite tenaciously. It was a poem, a very unusual poem, which Diamond heard somewhere but did not know where. His mother read it to him, and it seemed to go on forever, and would have done if she had not stopped, declaring that it seemed “such nonsense”. Diamond, however, was transfixed by it, and so was I. There is a river whose waters run asleep run run ever singing in the shallows dumb in the hollows sleeping so deep… There was something in the poem that seemed just like a river, and Diamond suggests this to be the case: “It’s such nonsense!” said his mother. “I believe it would go on for ever.” “That’s just what it did,” said Diamond. “What did?” she asked. “Why, the river. That’s almost the very tune it used to sing.” His mother was frightened, for she thought the fever was coming on again. So she did not contradict him. Of course, whatever little sense Diamond’s words seem to make, either to the mother or to us, they are somehow, paradoxically, true. And here we find again a truth that, for MacDonald, can best be told through fiction, through fairy tales. It is, after all, a truth which the “reasonable” ones of his age – like Diamond’s mother – failed altogether to grasp, a truth so magnificent that reason could only pale before it. IV. I came back to MacDonald when I was in my fourth year of University.
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