tteview of Reviews, 



Character Sketches. 



I.— GEORGE MACDONALD: A NINETEENTH CENTURY SEER. 



Bishop Ewing once said, " Should anyone at- 

 tempt to write the life of Mr. Erskine (that is 

 Thomas Erskine of Linlathen), the difficulty must 

 ever present itself to him that what he has to 

 depict is spirit and not matter, that he has to con- 

 vey light to represent sound — an almost insuperable 

 difficulty." A similar difficulty arises in the case of 

 George MacDonald. It is quite impossible to give 

 an impression of what he was to those who never 

 knew him. It is, perhaps, as impossible to write 

 about him so as to satisfy those who did know him 



By W. Garrett Horder. 



his best bits of writing. Anyway, you feel as you 

 read his writings that he saw more than he expressed 

 or could express. 



And it was surely a very providential thing that 

 he came to an age of great religious unrest — when 

 the anchors of faith were dragging in the gale — to 

 tell of the things which had held his own bark, that 

 at the very time when the traditional faith was yield- 

 ing under the searching scrutiny of modern days, 

 he should fell of what he himself had seen of God 

 —that when men had been trusting to the report, 



It would be easy enough to give the events of his and had found the report unsatisfying, he should 



life and an account of his books, but when this call them back to the thing. One of the greatest 



had been done the man — who was so much more services he rendered to his age — probably the very 



than these — would not have been revealed. greatest — was this, that he led men to reverse the 



The title that best describes him is that which process described by Browning — of " faith in the 



I have put at the head of this paper. To the public thing grown, faith in the report," and made them 



he was chieflv known as a novelist. To a smaller feel that it was not in reports about God, but in 



section he was known as quite a unique preacher. 

 Some there are who attach great value to his poetry ; 

 but I rather fancy those who knew him best would 

 think of him as one of the few Seers of the nine- 

 teenth centurv. The onlv other man I knew that 



God Himself as he had been revealed in Jesus 

 Christ, the eternal life was to be found. To an age 

 which had been feeding upon the husks of schemes, 

 creeds, formularies, articles, confessions, he came 

 with his hands full of the very bread which came 



I should put in that category would be John Puis- down from heaven, and which gives life to the 



ford. These men saw deeper into the heart of world. 



things than any I ever knew. I think that George Together with Tennyson and Browning he pro- 



MacDonald would not be the least displeased at bablv did more than all the professed theologians 



being called a Seer, for it was a favourite word of p Ut together to prevent an eclipse of faith in the 



his, and I have heard him say that every real poet latter half of the nineteenth century. These men 



was a Seer — a man who saw more than others. 



Mr. Gilbert Chesterton has said of him, " If we 

 test the matter by strict originality of outlook, 

 George MacDonald was one of the three or four 

 greatest men of nineteenth centurv Britain." That 

 Avill startle people who did not know him, and they 

 will say, " This is only Chesterton paradox." But 

 no one who knew him will dispute Mr. Chesterton 

 when he describes him as " the Sage — the sayer of 

 things. He is not the poet, for he does not sing, 

 he is not the prose writer, for generally he cannot 



understood, as the theologians did not, that the 

 fittest and fullest idiom for religion — the idiom in 

 which the most vital parts of the Bible are set— is 

 poetrv and not prose. And with the vision of poets 

 they interpreted the mystery. It would be impos- 

 sible to say how many souls, distressed, troubled, 

 perplexed bv the Calvinism of thirty or forty years 

 ago, found George MacDonald a refuge from the 

 storm. T question whether any priest sitting in his 

 confessional ever had so many hearts laid bare to 

 him as he. Certainly no priest ever dealt with per- 



write. The things he produces form an artistic plexed souls in a wiser way. I have known persons 



class by themselves ; they are logia of great pas 

 sionate maxims, the proverbs of philosophy." And 

 then he goes on to say, " He would have very 

 much preferred to walk about the streets of some 

 Greek or Eastern village with a long white beard, 

 simply saying what he had to say." 



Mr. Chesterton lays stress on the utterance. To 

 him he is the Sayer. But he could not have been 

 the Sayer unless he had been the Seer. ' am not 



to whom his decisions were like words from Heaven. 

 In these and other ways he was a great gift of God 

 to the latter half of the nineteenth century. But 

 for some years he has been hidden from the public 

 gaze. His voice has been silent, his pen laid down. 

 And so the younger folk of -the present generation 

 know him not, do not read his books, and do not 

 realise what they owe to him. When Dr. Hamilton 

 had finished writing John Ely's Life he took it to 



sure that he had not a little of the Highland second the printer and said : " Now, sir, do jour work 

 sight which he describes in " The Portent," one of quickly, for rmnisters are soon forgotten." And not 



