"C.S.Lewis "George MacDonald. An Antology" (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

of the stoic. He appears to have been a sunny, playful man, deeply
appreciative of all really beautiful and delicious things that money can
buy, and no less deeply content to do without them. It is perhaps
significant-it is certainly touching-that his chief recorded weakness was a
Highland love of finery; and he was all his life hospitable as only the poor
can be.
In making these extracts I have been concerned with MacDonald not as a
writer but as a Christian teacher. If I were to deal with him as a writer, a
man of letters, I should be faced with a difficult critical problem. If we
define Literature as an art whose medium is words, then certainly MacDonald
has no place in its first rank- perhaps not even in its second. There are
indeed passages, many of them in this collection, where the wisdom and (I
would dare to call it) the holiness that are in him triumph over and even
burn away the baser elements in his style: the expression becomes precise,
weighty, economic; acquires a cutting edge. But he does not maintain this
level for long. The texture of his writing as a whole is undistinguished, at
times fumbling. Bad pulpit traditions cling to it; there is sometimes a
nonconformist verbosity, sometimes an old Scotch weakness for florid
ornament (it runs right through them from Dunbar to the Waverly Novels),
sometimes an oversweetness picked up from Novalis. But this does not quite
dispose of him even for the literary critic. What he does best is
fantasy-fantasy that hovers between the allegorical and the mythopoeic. And
this, in my opinion, he does better than any man. The critical problem with
which we are confronted is whether this art-the art of myth-making-is a
species of the literary art. The objection to so classifying it is that the
Myth does not essentially exist in words at all. We all agree that the story
of Balder is a great myth, a thing of inexhaustible value. But of whose
version-whose words-are we thinking when we say this?
For my own part, the answer is that I am not thinking of anyone's
-words. No poet, as far as I know or can remember, has told this story
supremely well. I am not thinking of any particular version of it. If the
story is anywhere embodied in words, that is almost an accident.
What really delights and nourishes me is a particular pattern of
events, which would equally delight and nourish if it had reached me by some
medium which involved no words at all-say by a mime, or a film. And I find
this to be true of all such stories. When I think of the story of the
Argonauts and praise it, I am not praising Apollonius Rhodius (whom I never
finished) nor Kingsley (whom I have forgotten) nor even Morris, though I
consider his version a very pleasant poem. In this respect stories of the
mythical type are at the opposite pole from lyrical poetry. If you try to
take the "theme" of Keats's Nightingale apart from the very words in which
he has embodied it, you find that you are talking about almost nothing. Form
and content can there be separated only by a fake abstraction. But in a
myth-in a story where the mere pattern of events is all that matters-this is
not so. Any means of communication whatever which succeeds in lodging those
events in our imagination has, as we say, "done the trick." After that you
can throw the means of communication away. To be sure, if the means of
communication are words, it is desirable that a letter which brings you
important news should be fairly written. But this is only a minor
convenience; for the letter will, in any case, go into the wastepaper basket