GEORGE MACDONALD.
[TO THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR.'] Sin,—The writer of a sympathetic memoir of George Mac- donald in the Times of the 19th inst. concludes with a -description of his personal appearance,—" the head well shaped, the features fine, the whole expression noble." I take it that the observer by whose "friendly hand " these words were written never saw George Macdonald as he might have been seen in Lincoln's Inn Chapel in the late " fifties," or St. Peter's, Vere Street, in the early " sixties," in both places a rapt hearer of F. D. Maurice. It was at St. Peter's that I first saw him. He was kneeling at the rails of the Communion-table, and I seemed to be looking at the Christ as the painters have represented Him. The face might have been a canvas of Raphael or Francia translated into flesh and blood. Since then artists have been inclined to give a more Semitic cast to the sacred features ; but the tra- ditional face was there ; the age, too, seemed to suit, for George Macdonald must then have been some years short of forty. A more vivid impression I never had, and the man, as I came to know him afterwards, seemed to me not unequal, if so much can be said of any human being, to this prepossession. He was blameless,—I should put him, if one has to look for his like among authors, with John Greenleaf Whittier. And he was dominated by a passion for righteousness. Some of his readers, even admiring readers, thought that he preached too mucb,—never, certainly, did a writer of fiction venture so boldly to fill his chapters with sermons. But one felt, some- how, that he had to speak. The man and his books were wonderfully consistent. In his family life he was the most tender-hearted of men. He loved children with an intensity that seemed more like a woman's than a man's. He would put the little ones to sleep in his own working room. Not content, it would seem, with their own numerous off- spring, he and his wife adopted a stranger-child. And then to see him give himself up to their amusement ! I remember seeing him in a little play of Beauty and the Beast, where he took the part of the Beast, Beauty being one of his own daughters : how he reared him• self up—he was clad in a bear's skin—and with paws hanging down exclaimed in tones of infinite pathos, " Won't you love me, Beauty ? " I hope that I am not venturing on forbidden ground when I say that in early years, before he attained the comfort which one is glad to think attended his later days, Mrs. Macdonald must have experienced some of the "Provocations of Madame Palissy." The rare sovereign was not always expended as it should have been. Instead of a leg of mutton, he would bring back a book.—I am, Sir, &c.,
Previous page
