When a Heart is Really Alive: George MacDonald and the Prophetic Imagination

Wikipedia: 

George MacDonald (10 December 1824 – 18 September 1905) was a Scottish author, poet and Christian Congregational minister. He became a pioneering figure in the field of modern fantasy literature and the mentor of fellow-writer Lewis Carroll. In addition to his fairy tales, MacDonald wrote several works of Christian theology, including several collections of sermons.

. . .MacDonald is often regarded as the founding father of modern fantasy writing.[11] His best-known works are Phantastes (1858), The Princess and the Goblin (1872), At the Back of the North Wind (1868–1871), and Lilith (1895), all fantasy novels, and fairy tales such as “The Light Princess”, “The Golden Key”, and “The Wise Woman”. MacDonald claimed that “I write, not for children, but for the child-like, whether they be of five, or fifty, or seventy-five.” MacDonald also published some volumes of sermons, the pulpit not having proved an unreservedly successful venue.

. . .MacDonald served as a mentor to Lewis Carroll; it was MacDonald’s advice, and the enthusiastic reception of Alice by MacDonald’s many sons and daughters, that convinced Carroll to submit Alice for publication. Carroll, one of the finest Victorian photographers, also created photographic portraits of several of the MacDonald children. MacDonald was also friends with John Ruskin and served as a go-between in Ruskin’s long courtship with Rose La Touche. While in America he was befriended by Longfellow and Walt Whitman.

. . .MacDonald’s use of fantasy as a literary medium for exploring the human condition greatly influenced a generation of notable authors, including C. S. Lewis, who featured him as a character in his The Great Divorce.

. . .According to biographer William Raeper, MacDonald’s theology “celebrated the rediscovery of God as Father, and sought to encourage an intuitive response to God and Christ through quickening his readers’ spirits in their reading of the Bible and their perception of nature.”

An excerpt from, “George MacDonald and Dreams of the Other World” By David Holbrook, VII: Journal of the Marion E. Wade Center, March 1983:

In his Phantastes, George MacDonald’s fantasy story for adults, his protagonist, Anodos, sets out to explore the deeper levels of the mind by a form of “geology”. George MacDonald was one of those remarkable Victorian writers who recognised, before Freud, that fantasies and dreams were a way to the unconscious, and to the springs of creative being : in sleep, he declared, the mind ‘comes into a less disturbed contact with its origin, the heart of creation.’ There, the mind finds ‘wells of feeling and delight which have not yet broken out of their hiding places in our souls.’ (Wilfred Cumbermede).

We often seem to assume nowadays that the Victorian writer suppressed totally the deeper regions of the human psyche, especially of sexuality, and the more bestial of our proclivities. At the same time, however, since Freud, we seem less able to preserve a certain innocence, a certain capacity to work on the problems of existence by play, imagination and symbol : even our art has become too literal. If we believe that it is necessary to maintain the poetic facilities to achieve meaning, we may be less well off than they were.

The Victorian writer seemed able to preserve a certain innocence and because of this remained able to explore deep existential problems happily in fantasies which have the quality of dreams : The Water Babies, Alice in Wonderland, At the Back of the North Wind.

The innocence of which I have spoken enabled writer and audience in this mode to explore problems of life in the way children explore them, in their nursery rhymes, game rhymes and fairy tales, without the meaning ever becoming explicit. This, alas, I believe, is a faculty we have seriously lost. In Peter Pan and Mary Rose, by Sir James Barrie, for example, problems of being in existence, going out of existence, and especially the mysterious role of woman, of the Mother, in this process, could be poetically explored—in a kind of child’s play for adults which has beneath it a deadly serious recognition of the mystery of being.

This is true of the fantasies of George MacDonald, and accounts for their perennial appeal. I don’t say, as a critic, that all such “innocent” fantasy dealings with existence are good and creative: sometimes, as in Mary Rose, these fantasies are an expression of impossible desires, that the problems of life may be solved by magic, by wishing the self and the world were not as they tragically are. And over George MacDonald’s work I find myself having serious doubts sometimes—- about the end of At the Back of the North Wind where the child, Diamond, is taken away rapturously by the North Wind into the land of death: and about the loss of confidence in the future which seems to overtake him at the end of The Princess and Curdie. Lilith, George MacDonald’s other fairy tale for adults, does not in the end seem to me a successful work of art, because of its inconsistency: it leaves us in bewilderment, about whether we are in this reality or that; whether life is death or death is life, and, worst of all, whether each ordeal or purgatory or whatever, which the main characters go through, brings any real gains, in redeeming their souls, or finding meaning in existence. At the same time, in it, there is a kind of progress, from a world felt to be full of menace, to one in which benignity is possible and can be triumphant.

Video Title: When a Heart is Really Alive: George MacDonald and the Prophetic Imagination. Source: Wade Center. Date Published: May 30, 2024. Description: 

This lecture will explore how George MacDonald’s Fantasy writing not only created an entire new literary genre and inspired writers like C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, but also how the living, numinous symbols and stories he created continue to speak powerfully and prophetically into our own cultural crisis two hundred years after he was born.

Malcolm Guite is a poet and priest, and Life Fellow of Girton College, Cambridge. He lives in Norfolk, England, and lectures widely in England and North America on Theology and Literature. His books include Sounding the Seasons: Seventy Sonnets for the Christian Year (Canterbury, 2012); The Singing Bowl: Collected Poems (Canterbury, 2013); Parable and Paradox (Canterbury, 2016); Mariner: A Voyage with Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Hodder, 2017); After Prayer (Canterbury, 2019); The Word Within the Words (DLT, 2021); and Lifting The Veil (Canterbury, 2022). In 2023 he was awarded the Archbishop Lanfranc Medal for Education and Scholarship by the Archbishop of Canterbury.