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    Salted with Fire
    Salted with Fire
    Salted with Fire
    Ebook298 pages

    Salted with Fire

    By George MacDonald and Michael Phillips

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    The Scottish literary master’s final full-length realistic novel—his prodigal son tour de force. 

    MacDonald’s 1897 novel, Salted with Fire, is replete with dense Scottish dialect and spiritual themes. The repentance (through fire) of young minister James Blatherwick, who recognizes the sham of his pretended spirituality, is reminiscent of Thomas Wingfold’s spiritual journey. It also embodies in fictional form one of MacDonald’s signature themes from his first volume of Unspoken Sermons, “The Consuming Fire.” Along with these themes, the return of one of MacDonald’s favorite character “types,” the humble Scottish peasant bard, in the person of cobbler John MacLear, establishes Salted with Fire as a work of lasting importance in the MacDonald corpus. It arguably offers a fitting climax to MacDonald’s life message. This new edition by MacDonald biographer Michael Phillips streamlines the occasionally ponderous Victorian narrative style and updates the thick Doric dialect into readable English.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateMay 7, 2019
    ISBN9780795352751
    Salted with Fire
    Author

    George MacDonald

    George MacDonald (1824-1905) was a popular Scottish lecturer and writer of novels, poetry, and fairy tales. Born in Aberdeenshire, he was briefly a clergyman, then a professor of English literature at Bedford and King's College in London. W. H. Auden called him "one of the most remarkable writers of the nineteenth century."

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      Book preview

      Salted with Fire - George MacDonald

      Salted With Fire

      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): 978-0-7953-5275-1

      www.RosettaBooks.com

      The Cullen Collection

      of the Fiction of George MacDonald

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

      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

      CONTENTS

      Foreword to The Cullen Collection

      Introduction to Salted With Fire

      NOTE: As the introductions to the 37 volumes of The Cullen Collection form a continuous portrait of George MacDonald’s life, and as many of the introductions contain comprehensive and detailed discussion and analysis of the title in question—its plot, themes, and circumstances of writing—some first-time readers may choose to skip ahead to the story itself, saving the introduction for later, so as not to spoil the story.

      Prologue

      1. The Cobbler

      2. James Blatherwick

      3. Isy

      4. Empty Preaching

      5. Maggie MacLear

      6. The Baby

      7. Father and Daughter

      8. The Vagrant

      9. The Preacher

      10. James and the Soutar

      11. A Proposal and its Result

      12. Soul Searching

      13. Isy and the Robertsons

      14. A Divided Heart

      15. The Parents

      16. Gentleman or Hypocrite?

      17. The Fire

      18. A Proposition

      19. On the Moor

      20. Refuge

      21. Wisdom of the Wise Man

      22. Plain Speech

      23. A Mouldy Sermon

      24. Attempted Apology

      25. In the Arms of Death

      26. The Vigil

      27. The Waking

      28. A Better Awakening

      29. A Meeting

      30. Reunion

      31. Repentance

      32. A Righteous Father

      33. Forgiveness

      34. James and Isobel

      35. Healing

      36. Restoration

      "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 (including this one) 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. The thirteen realistic novels among these 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 encompass 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

      The Scots Peasant-Bard Returns

      It would probably be accurate to say that George MacDonald’s final full-length realistic novel, Salted With Fire, might never have been written. It was unplanned. MacDonald did not intend to write it. *

      With the publication of Lilith in 1895, physically and emotionally spent from the ordeal of getting it across the finish line, MacDonald and those around him assumed that his active writing life had come to an end. Whether one considers Lilith the triumphant climax to MacDonald’s career, or evidence that his mind was losing its grip and drifting into weird phantasms, it is clear that MacDonald himself, and his son Greville—overriding Louisa’s objections that it should not be published—viewed Lilith as a final prophetic message.

      Surely nothing else would, or even could, follow it.

      But MacDonald had another surprise or two up his sleeve, though at the time Lilith was published, even he did not know it yet. He was utterly drained, did no writing immediately afterward, and took months to recover.

      It gives an indication of MacDonald’s enduring popularity that during the 1890s, almost thirty collections and reprints of his writings were published in new editions. Though he probably received little additional income from most of these editions (if any), having sold the copyrights years before, many publishers still saw MacDonald as a bankable commodity. He may have been coming to the end of his long career, but his name was still recognized as in the top tier of the Victorian novelists.

      The lack of income from reprints, unless it had been specified beforehand, was not due to anything nefarious on the part of publishers—it was simply how things worked. Authors sold their copyrights, and that was that. Publishers could do with them what they wanted. It was not an unfair system toward authors, but was just the way publishing was structured. If a book sold poorly, an author might make more by receiving a lump sum for a copyright than they would have in royalties. However, if a book was an unexpected best-seller and the copyright had been sold for peanuts, then it was the publisher who cleaned up. It wasn’t so much different than an author receiving an advance today—the difference being that if a book sells well now, an author receives additional royalties based on sales. A.P. Watt was the first literary agent in the modern mold who worked toward such a royalty based arrangement for authors. But as in all aspects of the publishing world, change was slow to come and evolved gradually.

      For some years MacDonald’s two greatest fears about the approach of old age had been becoming a burden, presumably to his children, and losing his mental faculties. Given these anxieties about the effects of age, he was convinced that the best way to strengthen his mind was to exercise it. It was one of the reasons, during these years, that he attempted to teach himself Dutch and Spanish.

      After the break following the completion of Lilith, he wrote to Watt, by now his friend as well as agent, I have begun again to work, but writing takes all the strength I have to spend…My memory plays me sad tricks now. It comes of the frosty invasion of old age—preparing me to go home, thank God. Till then I must work, and that is good. ¹

      The unplanned and unsought next chapter in MacDonald’s writing life came in the form of a request in 1896 from the Glasgow Weekly Mail for a story for serialization. In order to keep working, he accepted the Mail’s request—more of a challenge than a request—and summoned the energy and will to undertake another novel. It was set—where else!—in his homeland, indeed, in the same fictional village he had left in Heather and Snow.

      The eventual outcome was Salted With Fire, in which MacDonald demonstrated to his readership, though personal doubts may have haunted him, that he still possessed narrative power.

      The book ran in the Glasgow Weekly Mail from January 9 to May 1, 1897, and then was published in America by Dodd Mead and by Hurst and Blackett in England (their first MacDonald title in eighteen years) in the fall of that year.

      The book turned out to be more significant than an afterthought. In spite of being largely neglected by critics and biographers, Salted With Fire proved a far more apropros climax to MacDonald’s career than Lilith, representing almost a paradigm of MacDonald’s fictional corpus.

      Yet once having recovered from the exhaustion of Lilith, his new Scottish novel was not the only project on MacDonald’s plate. If he was determined to keep his brain vigorous, what better way than by immersing himself yet again in the translations of his favorite poets. Poetry remained the default medium for MacDonald’s creativity. He had to work to produce fantasy or realistic fiction. Though he edited his poems over and over, poetry came of itself. (A few years later, when confined to a wheelchair, he was still scribbling almost illegible bits of verse on pieces of paper.)

      As he was writing Salted With Fire, then, MacDonald was also working on a new volume to be released in 1897, the same year as the new novel. It comprised a collection of poems and translations that included his former Novalis work, a reprint of the contents of Exotics, a reprint of Diary of an Old Soul, as well as a few new entries. Though by this time publishers were reprinting his work on their own, this is surely a project that MacDonald had a hand in personally, no doubt working on it through 1896. Who else would have had the vision to see such a project through?

      The subtitle of the new collection of poems is pure MacDonald, further indication that the work is his, not mere reprints thrown together by a publisher. The writings and translations included were deeply part of his spiritual fiber, going all the way back to 1851. These selections were MacDonald’s devotional, mental, and spiritual food.

      The title, complete with full subtitle, was Rampolli, Growths from a long-planted root, being translations chiefly from the German, along with A Year’s Diary of an Old Soul. It was published by Longmans Green. It is possible they may have requested that MacDonald compile a new and complete edition of his translations. If so, MacDonald was only too happy to comply.

      This re-emergence of Longmans Green is intriguing. They were his first publisher, having given MacDonald his start in 1855 with Within and Without. Then for thirty years they were never heard from again, until 1885 when they suddenly published two titles by MacDonald—The Tragedie of Hamlet and Unspoken Sermons, Second Series. They followed with Unspoken Sermons, Third Series, and now Rampolli.

      George MacDonald’s final traditional novel, Salted With Fire, is intensely Scottish, with more impenetrable Huntlyesque dialect than most of its predecessors, and tells a powerful story of sin and repentance. Again, a clergyman occupies the heart of the drama, another minister cut in the mold of Thomas Wingfold, but one whose sin is greater and therefore whose repentance must probe deeper.

      While the aim of Home Again, published exactly ten years before, was to recast the prodigal parable as fiction, in spite of its many redeeming qualities, in a sense it fails to live up to the promise of that purpose. It cannot be said to exemplify the power of the original of Luke 15.

      In Salted With Fire, MacDonald at last fulfills that objective. It represents his Prodigal Son tour de force.

      The phrase salted with fire is never used in the narrative, but there can be no doubt what MacDonald means by his title. It is the fire that purges sin and leads to repentance. The fire occupied a central role in MacDonald’s theology, not merely of the afterlife but of the ongoing life of turning from sin. The very title of this book brings full circle the image of fire depicted in Chapter 50 of David Elginbrod (A Sunday With Falconer) with its fictionalization of F.D. Maurice, then later in one of his first published sermons, The Consuming Fire.

      The reviews of Salted With Fire, both then and now, were and are almost universally disparaging. No one had eyes to see this unifying connection, this consistent thread weaving its way over more than thirty years through MacDonald’s writings. Not apprehending it, how could they possibly view Salted With Fire but through a literary, rather than a spiritual lens? Even now, most MacDonald scholars remain oblivious to the hidden truth that this work brings MacDonald’s career full-circle to a unifying climax far more so than does Lilith.

      When the sermon The Consuming Fire (1867) and this last full-length novel (1897) are placed side by side, that climax of unifying theological vision is complete. Even Ronald, however, MacDonald’s own son, failed to apprehend the great harmonizing unity in this work of his father’s final years. He calls Salted With Fire a book written with failing powers, of heavy-footed progression, and with little freshness of imagination. ²

      Richard Reis does not even list the book in his index of MacDonald’s titles.

      William Raeper echoes Ronald with this dreary assessment: "Heather and Snow came out in 1893, Lilith in 1895 and Salted with Fire in 1897, but by then the fire had gone. Salted with Fire was little more than a worn-out replay of all his earlier themes." ³

      This is generally typical of the response to MacDonald’s work—the mysticism of the fantasies blinds the eyes of analysis to the deeper gold of the realistic novels. In some very odd way, Phantastes and Lilith are the great eye-blinders of MacDonald’s corpus, preventing its worshippers from seeing the true George MacDonald. William Raeper, for example, as greatly as I esteem the work that went into his biography, devotes an entire chapter of twenty-one pages to Lilith plus a detailed appendix, while dismissing Salted With Fire with thirteen words. It is an entire misplacement of perspective which unfortunately characterizes much of the academic community’s assessment of the MacDonald corpus. That academic assessment of MacDonald’s writing life, placing Phantastes and Lilith at the jointly shared apex, stands greatly in need of an overhaul.

      For that reason, I am compelled to take a detour as we come to the final volumes of The Cullen Collection, and address the broader picture of how George MacDonald’s fiction must be read for its deepest merits to be rightly understood.

      The flaw inherent in much analysis of George MacDonald’s fiction, and indeed in much of the attention given to his life in general, is that it originates from an incomplete vantage point, one from which MacDonald’s fiction can never be properly understood. Thus, most critical and scholarly attention to MacDonald’s realistic novels, and his fictional corpus in general, fails to apprehend their foundational purpose.

      In a great and unfortunate twist of irony, it is the very man largely responsible for the veneration in which MacDonald is held in our time whose words about his master and his writings have been taken to imply what I do not think he actually meant. That man, of course, is dear C.S. Lewis, whom most reading these words love and admire as much as I do.

      The fact of this regrettable irony saddens me tremendously. To see Lewis so taken out of context, so thoroughly misunderstood, and then MacDonald misunderstood as a result, represents one of the grievous unintended consequences that has emerged out of Lewis’s illustrious career as the preeminent Christian spokesman of the twentieth century.

      The flawed critical approach that is observed at root in many MacDonald studies proceeds directly out of a failure to see the larger picture toward which some of Lewis’s observations about MacDonald point. Yet it is also true that when Lewis dons the hat of the critic or analyst, he can be almost caustically blunt. If one is not paying attention to the larger picture, his words can indeed be misunderstood.

      Lewis writes, "If we define Literature as an art whose medium is words, then certainly Macdonald [sic] has no place in its first rank—perhaps not even in its second. There are indeed passages…where the wisdom and…the holiness that are in him triumph over and even burn away the baser elements in his style: the expression becomes precise, weighty, economic; acquires a cutting edge. But he does not maintain this level for long. The texture of his writing is as a whole undistinguished, at times fumbling. Bad pulpit traditions cling to it; there is sometimes a nonconformist verbosity, sometimes an old Scotch weakness for florid ornament." ⁴

      What Lewis has done here, wearing the hat of the critic, is to dole out an apparent compliment about certain passages in MacDonald where the writing style is good, yet then seems to relegate him to the status, as he says later, of a poor novelist. Irreparable harm was thus done to the future of MacDonald studies by misreading Lewis’s larger picture view at this point about MacDonald’s most important genre of work.

      As a novelist who has studied the art of fiction for forty

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