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

particularly admirable. All romantics are vividly aware of mutability, but
most of them are content to bewail it: for MacDonald this nostalgia is
merely the starting point-he goes on and discovers what it is made for. His
psychology also is worth noticing: he is quite as well aware as the moderns
that the conscious self, the thing revealed by introspection, is a
superficies. Hence the cellars and attics of the King's castle in The
Princess and the Goblins, and the terror of his own house which falls upon
Mr. Vane in Lilith: hence also his formidable critique (201) of our daily
assumptions about the self. Perhaps most remarkable of all is the function-a
low and primitive, yet often indispensable function-which he allows to Fear
in the spiritual life (Numbers 3, 5, 6, 7, 137, 142, 143, 349). Reaction
against early teachings might on this point have very easily driven him into
a shallow liberalism. But it does not. He hopes, indeed, that all men will
be saved; but that is because he hopes that all will repent. He knows (none
better) that even omnipotence cannot save the uncoverted. He never trifles
with eternal impossibilities. He is as golden and genial as Traherne; but
also as astringent as the Imitation.
So at least I have found him. In making this collection I was
discharging a debt of justice. I have never concealed the fact that I
regarded him as my master; indeed I fancy I have never written a book in
which I did not quote from him. But it has not seemed to me that those who
have received my books kindly take even now sufficient notice of the
affiliation. Honesty drives me to emphasize it. And even if honesty did
not-well, I am a don, and "source-hunting" (Quellenforschung) is perhaps in
my marrow. It must be more than thirty years ago that I bought-almost
unwillingly, for I had looked at the volume on that bookstall and rejected
it on a dozen previous occasions-the Everyman edition of Phantasies. A few
hours later I knew that I had crossed a great frontier. I had already been
waist-deep in Romanticism; and likely enough, at any moment, to flounder
into its darker and more evil forms, slithering down the steep descent that
leads from the love of strangeness to that of eccentricity and thence to
that of perversity. Now Phantasies was romantic enough in all conscience;
but there was a difference. Nothing was at that time further from my
thoughts than Christianity and I therefore had no notion what this
difference really was. I was only aware that if this new world was strange,
it was also homely and humble; that if this was a dream, it was a dream in
which one at least felt strangely vigilant; that the whole book had about it
a sort of cool, morning innocence, and also, quite unmistakably, a certain
quality of Death, good Death. What it actually did to me was to convert,
even to baptize (that was where the Death came in) my imagination. It did
nothing to my intellect nor (at that time) to my conscience. Their turn came
far later and with the help of many other books and men. But when the
process was complete-by which, of course, I mean "when it had really
begun"-I found that I was still with MacDonald and that he had accompanied
me all the way and that I was now at last ready to hear from him much that
he could not have told me at that first meeting. But in a sense, what he was
now telling me was the very same that he had told me from the beginning.
There was no question of getting through to the kernel and throwing away the
shell: no question of a gilded pill. The pill was gold all through.
The quality which had enchanted me in his imaginative works turned out