The Portent

The Portent

George MacDonald

Introductory material © 2018 by Michael Phillips

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

Electronic edition published 2018 by RosettaBooks

ISBN (Kindle): 978-0-7953-5198-3

www.RosettaBooks.com

The Cullen Collection of the

Fiction of George MacDonald

1. Phantastes (1858)

2. David Elginbrod (1863)

3. The Portent (1864)

4. Adela Cathcart (1864)

5. Alec Forbes of Howglen (1865)

6. Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood (1867)

7. Robert Falconer (1868)

8. Guild Court (1868)

9. The Seaboard Parish (1868)

10. At the Back of the North Wind (1871)

11. Ranald Bannerman’s Boyhood (1871)

12. The Princess and the Goblin (1872)

13. Wilfrid Cumbermede (1872)

14. The Vicar’s Daughter (1872)

15. Gutta Percha Willie (1873)

16. Malcolm (1875)

17. The Wise Woman (1875)

18. St. George and St. Michael (1876)

19. Thomas Wingfold Curate (1876)

20. The Marquis of Lossie (1877)

21. Paul Faber Surgeon (1879)

22. Sir Gibbie (1879)

23. Mary Marston (1881)

24. Castle Warlock (1881)

25. The Princess and Curdie (1882)

26. Weighed and Wanting (1882)

27. Donal Grant (1883)

28. What’s Mine’s Mine (1886)

29. Home Again (1887)

30. The Elect Lady (1888)

31. A Rough Shaking (1890)

32. There and Back (1891)

33. The Flight of the Shadow (1891)

34. Heather and Snow (1893)

35. Lilith (1895)

36. Salted With Fire (1897)

37. Far Above Rubies (1898)

The introductions to the 37 volumes form a continuous picture of George MacDonald’s literary life, viewed through the prism of the development of his written legacy of works. While each book can of course be read on its own, every introduction picks up where that to the previous volume left off, with special attention to the title under consideration. The introductions together, as a biography of MacDonald’s life as a writer, are compiled in Volume 38.

38. George MacDonald A Writer’s Life

The Cullen Collection

of the Fiction of George MacDonald

New editions of George MacDonald’s classic fiction works updated and introduced by Michael Phillips

CONTENTS

Foreword to The Cullen Collection

Introduction to The Portent

Dedication

1. My Boyhood

2. The Second Hearing

3. My Old Nurses Story

4. My Way Home

5. Hilton Hall

6. Lady Alice

7. My Quarters

8. The Library

9. The Somnambulist

10. The First Waking

11. Love and Power

12. A New Pupil

13. Confession

14. Questioning

15. Jealousy

16. The Chamber of Ghosts

17. The Clanking Shoe

18. Adrift

19. The Physician

20. Old Friends

21. Old Constancy

22. Margaret

23. Visions

24. A Parting

25. Hilton

26. The Sleeper

27. My Old Room

28. Prison-Breaking

29. New Entrenchments

30. Escape

31. Freedom

"Papa seems so quietly happy."

—Louisa MacDonald, May 4, 1872, from Deskford (near Cullen)

"Papa does enjoy this place so much."

—Louisa MacDonald, May 6, 1872 from the Seafield Arms Hotel, Cullen

"Papa oh! so jolly & bright & happy…Papa was taken for Lord Seafield yesterday."

—Louisa MacDonald, Sept. 2, 1873, from Cullen

"Papa is very poorly. He ought to go to Cullen for a week I think."

—Louisa MacDonald, October 5, 1873, from London

FOREWORD

The Cullen Collection

of the Fiction of George MacDonald

The series name for these works of Scotsman George MacDonald (1824-1905) has its origins in the 1830s when the boy MacDonald formed what would be a lifelong affection for the northeast Scottish village of Cullen.

The ocean became young George’s delight. At the age of eleven, writing from Portsoy or Cullen, he announced to his father his intention to go to sea as a sailor—in his words, as soon as possible. The broad white beach of Cullen Bay, the Seatown, the grounds of Cullen House, the temple of Psyche (Temple of the Winds), Cullen Burn, the dwellings along Grant Street, Scarnose, and especially Findlater Castle, all seized the youth’s imagination with a love that never left him. MacDonald continued to visit Huntly and Cullen throughout his life, using his childhood love for his homeland as the backdrop for his richest novels, including what is arguably his greatest work of fiction, Malcolm, published in 1875.

We therefore honor MacDonald’s unique relationship to Cullen with these newly updated editions of his novels. In Cullen, in certain respects more than in any other place, one finds the transcendent spirit of George MacDonald’s life and the ongoing legacy of his work still magically alive after a century and a half. This release of The Cullen Collection of the Fiction of George MacDonald coincides with a memorial bench and plaque established on Cullen’s Castle Hill commemorating MacDonald’s visits to the region.

To those readers familiar with my previous editions of MacDonald’s novels, I should make clear that eighteen of the volumes in this new series are updated and expanded titles from the Bethany House series of the 1980s. Limitations of length dictated much about how those previous volumes were produced. To interest a publisher in the project during those years when MacDonald was a virtual unknown in the publishing world, certain sacrifices had to be made. Cuts to length had to be more severe than I would have preferred. Practicality drove the effort. Imperfect as they were in some respects, I am enormously grateful for those editions. They helped inaugurate a worldwide renaissance of interest in MacDonald. They were wonderful door-openers for many thousands into MacDonald’s world.

Hopefully this new and more comprehensive set of MacDonald’s fiction will take up where they left off. Not constrained by the limitations that dictated production of the former volumes, these new editions, though identical at many points, have been expanded—sometimes significantly. In that sense they reflect MacDonald’s originals somewhat more closely, while still preserving the flavor, pace, and readability of their predecessors.

Nineteen additional titles have been added to the original Bethany House series of novels. The thirteen realistic novels among these (including this one) have been updated according to the same priorities that guided the earlier Bethany House series. That process will be explained in more detail in the introductions to the books of the series. The final six which would more accurately be termed fantasy, have not been edited in any way. They are faithful reproductions of the originals exactly as they were first published. These six—Phantastes, At the Back of the North Wind, The Princess and the Goblin, The Wise Woman, The Princess and Curdie, and Lilith—are so well known and have been published literally in hundreds of editions through the years, that it has seemed best to reproduce them for The Cullen Collection with the same texts by which they are generally known.*

Dedicated followers of all great men and women continually seek hints that reveal their inner being—the true man, the true woman. What were they really like? What made him or her tick? Many biographies and studies attempt to answer such questions. In George MacDonald’s case, however, a panorama of windows exists that reveals far more about his person than the sum-total of everything that has been written about him over the years. Those are the novels that enccompass his life’s work. The volumes of this series represent the true spiritual biography of the man, a far more important biography than life’s details can ever tell.

In 1911, six years after his father’s death, George MacDonald’s son Ronald wrote of the man with whom he had spent his life:

"The ideals of his didactic novels were the motive of his own life…a life of literal, and, which is more, imaginative consistency with his doctrine…There has probably never been a writer whose work was a better expression of his personal character. This I am not engaged to prove; but I very positively assert…that in his novels…and allegories…one encounters...the same rich imagination, the same generous lover of God and man, the same consistent practiser of his own preaching, the same tender charity to the sinner with the same uncompromising hostility to the sin, which were known in daily use and by his own people counted upon more surely than sunshine." *

Thirty years after the publication of my one-volume biography George MacDonald Scotland’s Beloved Storyteller, it now gives me great pleasure to present this thirty-seven-volume biography of the man, the Scotsman, the prophetic spiritual voice who is George MacDonald. *

How fitting is the original title in which Ronald MacDonald’s sketch of his father quoted above first appeared, From A Northern Window. For any attempted portrait of the man George MacDonald becomes at once a window into his homeland as well.

Therefore, I invite you to gaze back in time through the northern windows of these volumes. Picture yourself perhaps near the cheerful hearth described in the opening pages of What’s Mine’s Mine, looking out the window to the cold seas and mountains in the distance, where perhaps you get a fleeting glimpse of highlanders Ian and Alister Macruadh.

Or imagine yourself walking up Duke Street in Huntly from MacDonald’s birth home, following in the footsteps of fictional Robert Falconer to the town square.

Or envision yourself on some windswept highland moor with Gibbie or Cosmo Warlock.

Or walk up the circular staircase of Fyvie Castle to Donal Grant’s tiny tower hideaway where he began to unravel the mysteries of that ancient and spooky place.

Or walk from Cullen’s Seatown alongside Malcolm selling the fish in his creel, turning at the Market Cross into Grant Street and continuing past Miss Horn’s house and up the hill to the entrance of the Cullen House grounds.

Or perhaps climb Castle Hill to the George MacDonald memorial bench and gaze across the sweep of Cullen Bay to Scarnose as Malcolm’s story comes to life before your eyes.

From any of these settings, whether real or imaginary, drift back through the years and gaze through the panoramic windows of these stories, and take in with pleasure the drama, relationships, images, characters, settings, and spiritual truths George MacDonald offers us as we are drawn into his world.

Michael Phillips

Cullen, Morayshire

Scotland, 2017

INTRODUCTION

A Spooky First Novel

Welcome to the third volume in The Cullen Collection of the Fiction of George MacDonald. In Volume 2 we looked at the circumstances that led to MacDonald’s career as a realistic novelist (if we place Phantastes from five years earlier in a distinct fictional category of its own). The background of this next of MacDonald’s published novels requires us to retrace our steps further back than the Elginbrodde epitaph that sparked MacDonald’s imagination in 1862 with the writing of David Elginbrod.*

The Portent is actually MacDonald’s first published realistic novel. It is his second attempted novel after Seekers and Finders, which was never published. The Portent appeared initially in the new Cornhill Magazine in the year 1860, but it did not appear in book form until after the success of David Elginbrod.

As we prepare to read The Portent, it will be helpful to pick up the events of George MacDonald’s life where they left off from the introductions to the previous two volumes. Then we will look more specifically at this unusual and distinctive title in MacDonald’s fictional corpus.

It might be said that The Portent has its origins during MacDonald’s university years in Aberdeen when he was seventeen or eighteen.

During a break from his studies (probably for financial reasons) in 1842 or 1843, young MacDonald may have been engaged to catalog a library in the far north of Scotland. This mysterious episode in MacDonald’s life has caused considerable uncertainty and conjecture for MacDonald’s biographers. In his biography of his parents, MacDonald’s son Greville states it as fact.

Greville writes: "He spent some summer months in a certain castle or mansion in the far North, the locality of which I have failed to trace, in cataloguing a neglected library. That he did acquire intimate experience of this kind is obvious from his frequent use of such-like material in his fiction—notably in The Portent, David Elginbrod, Adela Cathcart, Wilfrid Cumbermede, There and Back, Donal Grant and Lilith. The library, wherever it was, and whatever its scope, added much to the materials upon which his imagination worked in future years." ¹ To this list of titles influenced by a great library experience we should also add Alec Forbes.

Such a hiatus from university was often a necessity for the farming families of many students, and common among those attending Aberdeen University. The following passage from David Elginbrod about Hugh Sutherland was surely a reflection of MacDonald’s own university experience. MacDonald’s tutoring days, however, actually came after graduation, and the hiatus from his studies was presumably spent in the library.

Despite strained circumstances, his father and mother had resolved, cost what it might in pinching and squeezing, to send their son to college before turning him out to shift for himself. And so they had managed to keep their boy at college for three sessions, after the last of which, instead of returning home as he had done on previous occasions, he had looked about for a temporary engagement as tutor.

For nearly a hundred years this library in the north interlude in the midst of MacDonald’s university studies—influencing his spiritual search, turning him toward German Romanticism both poetically and spiritually, and influencing his future writings and romantic ideals—has been an accepted fact of MacDonald’s biography. It has come into question in recent years, however, on the basis of a letter written by MacDonald later in his life, which seems to cast a shadow of doubt over this prevailing school of thought. In it he lamented the fact that he had seen so little of his native Scotland, seemingly including the far north.

Because this library episode provides an underlying foundation for The Portent, and, as Greville notes, comes into several other books—and because it is simply fascinating to anyone interested in the forces that molded MacDonald’s life—I have set out the arguments and evidences in more detail in the footnotes at the end of this introduction. ²

It may, therefore, have been at the unknown castle or mansion, surrounded by the books of the great library (Thurso Castle, mentioned by Greville as the most likely location, did indeed possess a sizeable collection of German authors), where young George MacDonald came under the influence of several German writers and took great strides toward fluency in the German language. The impact of the German romanticists and theologians opened young MacDonald to an imaginative Christian mysticism that resonated with his questioning soul. The most noteworthy of these was the German poet Georg Frederick Philipp von Hardenberg (1772-1801), whose pseudonym was simply Novalis. It is difficult to identify exactly what in Novalis’s writings awakened something within the youthful MacDonald. Perhaps the most we can say in attempting to understand