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

of him to anyone who had met him. For the very few facts which I am going to
mention I am therefore entirely dependent on Dr. MacDonald.
We have learned from Freud and others about those distortions in
character and errors in thought which result from a man's early conflicts
with his father. Far the most important thing we can know about George
MacDonald is that his whole life illustrates the opposite process. An almost
perfect relationship with his father was the earthly root of all his wisdom.
From his own father, he said, he first learned that Fatherhood must be at
the core of the universe. He was thus prepared in an unusual way to teach
that religion in which the relation of Father and Son is of all relations
the most central.
His father appears to have been a remarkable man - a man hard, and
tender, and humorous all at once, in the old fashion of Scotch Christianity.
He had had his leg cut off above the knee in the days before chloroform,
refusing the customary dose of preliminary whisky, and "only for one moment,
when the knife first transfixed the flesh, did he turn his face away and
ejaculate a faint, sibilant whiff." He had quelled with a fantastic joke at
his own expense an ugly riot in which he was being burned in effigy. He
forbade his son to touch a saddle until he had learned to ride well without
one. He advised him "to give over the fruitless game of poetry." He asked
from him, and obtained, a promise to renounce tobacco at the age of
twenty-three. On the other hand he objected to grouse shooting on the score
of cruelty and had in general a tenderness for animals not very usual among
farmers more than a hundred years ago; and his son reports that he never, as
boy or man, asked him for anything without getting what he asked. Doubtless
this tells us as much about the son's character as the father's and should
be taken in connection with our extract on prayer (104). "He who seeks the
Father more than anything He can give, is likely to have what he asks, for
he is not likely to ask amiss." The theological maxim is rooted in the
experiences of the author's childhood. This is what may be called the
"anti-Freudian predicament" in operation.
George MacDonald's family (though hardly his father) were of course
Calvinists. On the intellectual side his history is largely a history of
escape from the theology in which he had been brought up. Stories of such
emancipation are common in the nineteenth century; but George MacDonald's
story belongs to this familiar pattern only with a difference. In most such
stories the emancipated person, not content with repudiating the doctrines,
comes also to hate the persons, of his forebears, and even the whole culture
and way of life with which they are associated. Thus books like The Way of
All flesh come to be written; and later generations, if they do not swallow
the satire wholesale as history, at least excuse the author for a
one-sidedness which a man in his circumstances could hardly have been
expected to avoid. Of such personal resentment I find no trace in MacDonald.
It is not we who have to find extenuating circumstances for his point of
view. On the contrary, it is he himself, in the very midst of his
intellectual revolt, who forces us, whether we will or no, to see elements
of real and perhaps irreplaceable worth in the thing from which he is
revolting.
All his life he continued to love the rock from which he had been hewn.
All that is best in his novels carries us back to that "kaleyard" world of