Robert Falconer

By George MacDonald and Michael Phillips

The story of a boy’s spiritual transformation in the shadow of the Scottish Highlands—from the 19th-century author of David Elginbrod.
 
In George MacDonald’s most well-known novel, published in 1868, the quest of young Robert Falconer for his father becomes a parallel quest to break free from the oppressive Calvinist theology of his grandmother. As he struggles to come to terms with the strict orthodoxy prevalent in Scotland for two centuries, the doctrine of hell looms as the great stumbling block in Robert’s mind. His lifelong search reveals to Robert the groundbreaking truth that hell is remedial not punitive, designed to produce ultimate repentance not everlasting punishment.
 
This highly autobiographical work offers a rare glimpse into MacDonald’s own youthful quandaries, and a window into the development of his faith, which would turn generations toward the Fatherhood of a loving God. After the book’s publication, as a result of the bold themes running through the narrative, MacDonald came to be considered a “universalist” and “heretic” in some circles—grievous mischaracterizations that persist to this day. This new edition by MacDonald biographer Michael Phillips streamlines the occasionally ponderous Victorian narrative style and updates the thick Doric brogue into readable English.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Nov 26, 2018
• ISBN: 9780795351976

George MacDonald

George MacDonald (1824 – 1905) was a Scottish-born novelist and poet. He grew up in a religious home influenced by various sects of Christianity. He attended University of Aberdeen, where he graduated with a degree in chemistry and physics. After experiencing a crisis of faith, he began theological training and became minister of Trinity Congregational Church. Later, he gained success as a writer penning fantasy tales such as Lilith, The Light Princess and At the Back of the North Wind. MacDonald became a well-known lecturer and mentor to various creatives including Lewis Carroll who famously wrote, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland fame.

Book preview

Robert Falconer

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): 978-0-7953-5197-6

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 Robert Falconer

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.

PART I—HIS BOYHOOD

1.     A Recollection

2.     A Visitor

3.     The Boar’s Head

4.     Shargar

5.     Conversations at the Inn

6.     Mrs. Falconer

7.     School

8.     The Angel Unawares

9.     A Magnificent Discovery

10.   Another Discovery in the Garret

11.   Begrudging Compassion

12.   The Violin

13.   Robert’s Plan of Salvation

14.   Robert’s Mother

15.   Mary St. John

16.   Mr. Lammie’s Farm

17.   The Factory

18.   Nature’s Claim

19.   A Daring Rescue

20.   The Hewson Cottage

21.   The Dragon

22.   Dr. Anderson

23.   The Affair of the Shoes

24.   Cleansing by Fire

25.   A Glorious Offer

26.   The Gates of Paradise

PART II—HIS YOUTH

27.   Winter of Discontent

28.   The Stroke

29.   Dooble Sanny

30.   Aberdeen

31.   The Competition

32.   Three Renewed Friendships

33.   A Conversation

34.   Shargar’s Accident

35.   A Strange Journey

36.   The Heart of the King

37.   A Grave Opened

38.   Ericson Fades

39.   Shargar Aspires to Breeding

40.   Death

PART III—HIS MANHOOD

41.   In the Desert

42.   On the Mountain

43.   The Will of God

44.   Home Again

45.   A Mere Glimpse

46.   The Doctor’s Death

47.   A Talk with Grannie

48.   Shargar’s Mother

49.   The Silk Weaver

50.   My Own Acquaintance

51.   The Brothers

52.   A Neophyte

53.   The Attack

54.   Recovery

55.   End of the Quest

56.   Andrew Rebels

57.   The Brown Letter

58.   Father and Son

59.   Change of Scene

60.   Three Generations

61.   The Whole Story

62.   The Vanishing

63.   In Expectatione

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 Great Bob

The day is one I will never forget.

My wife Judy and I were in our first enthusiastic year of discovering the writings of George MacDonald. *

Our journey had only just begun. We had read but a handful of MacDonald’s fairy tales, the Curdie books, North Wind, The Wise Woman, and Elizabeth Yates’ wonderful edited edition of Sir Gibbie. We had never seen one of the full-length realistic novels.

Rummaging through a huge used bookstore in Seattle in 1971 while visiting my aging grandmother in Everett, Washington, at first I was met with disappointment. Over and over, back and forth, my eyes roved the shelves. But no MacDonalds were to be seen.

After some time, however, looking more closely, I noticed that behind the books I had been perusing were more books. The shelves were filled two rows deep. A second floor-to-ceiling inventory was stacked in back of the spines that were visible. An entire phantom library was hidden from view.

With sudden renewed exhilaration for the hunt, I began grabbing the spines of books in the M authors section, pulling out a handful, and peering behind them. Quickly I scanned the hidden spines, replaced the books in my hand, and moved along the row, then repeated the process…again…and again.

Suddenly my eyes fell on the words George MacDonald engraved in gold on two dusty old spines.

Reverently I reached in, as if I had just discovered a long-lost treasure (as indeed I had!) and removed the two books. I sat down cross-legged on the floor, holding them as if a newborn infant had been placed in my hands. No one opening a chest of gold doubloons from a Spanish galleon could have been quivering with more anticipatory excitement as I was in those moments.

The first was an undated black Hurst and Blackett copy of Robert Falconer, the second a two-column Lippincott edition of The Marquis of Lossie dated 1877. How could I know at that moment what a huge role these two books would play in my future, or that this discovery would eventually launch my career as an author, publisher, and novelist?

The adventure continued when I began to read Robert Falconer that same evening in my grandmother’s house. A few hours later I had not, in C.S. Lewis’s words about his discovery of Phantastes, crossed a great frontier. I was actually more bewildered than anything. After such enormous anticipation, I confess to more than a little disappointment. I found the going more difficult than I had expected. Encountering the Scottish dialect straightaway in the second chapter, I slammed into conversational dialogue between the characters that looked like jibberish. The pace of my reading ground to a standstill.

"You ’at’s been in a’ day with a sair heid! I’ll jist gang benn the hoose and tell the mistress, and syne we’ll see what she’ll please to say till ’t."

"Ye’ll do naething of the kin’, Betty. Are ye gaein’ to turn clash-pyet at your age?"

"What ken ye aboot my age? There’s never a man-body in the toon kens aught aboot my age."

"It’s ower muckle for onybody to min’ upo’, is ’t, Betty?"

"Dinna be ill-tongued, Robert, or I’ll jist gang benn the hoose to the mistress."

"Betty, wha began with bein’ ill-tongued? Gin ye tell my grandmither that I gaed oot the nicht, I’ll gang to the schuilmaister of Muckledrum, and get a sicht of the kirstenin’ buik; and gin yer name binna there, I’ll tell ilkabody I meet ’at oor Betty was never kirstened; and that’ll be a sair affront, Betty."

I labored through, managing to make enough sense of it to persevere in following the story line. It was, after all, something like English after a fashion, not Greek. But my first full-length MacDonald novel became a laborious read. Most of the dialogue in the early chapters was written in this strange tongue, such as when Robert’s grandmother breaks out in despairing prayer:

"Och hone! och hone! said grannie from the bed. I’ve a sair, sair hert. I’ve a sair hert in my breist, O Lord! thoo knowest. My ain Anerew! To think of my bairnie that I cairriet in my ain body, that sookit my breists, and leuch in my face—to think of ‘im bein’ a reprobate! O Lord! cudna he be eleckit yet? Is there nae turnin’ of thy decrees? Na, na; that wadna do at a’. But while there’s life there’s houp. But wha kens whether he be alive or no? Naebody can tell. Glaidly wad I luik upon ’s deid face gin I cud believe that his sowl wasna amang the lost. But eh! the torments of that place! and the reik that gangs up for ever and ever, smorin’ the stars! And my Anerew doon in the hert of ’t cryin’! And me no able to with till him! O Lord! I canna say thy will be done. But dinna lay ’t to my chairge; for gin ye was a mither yersel’ ye wadna pit him there. O Lord! I’m verra ill-fashioned. I beg yer pardon. I’m near oot of my min’. Forgie me, O Lord! for I hardly ken what I’m sayin’. He was my ain babe, my ain Anerew, and ye gae him to me yersel’. And noo he’s for the finger of scorn to pint at; an ootcast and a wan’erer frae his ain country, and daurna come within sicht of ’t for them ’at wad tak’ the law of ’m."

Or when Robert is emboldened to tell his grannie what he would say if given the opportunity to speak in heaven:

"Weel, gin I with in there, the verra first nicht I sit doon with the lave of them, I’m gaein’ to rise up and say—that is, gin the Maister, at the heid of the table, disna bid me sit doon--and say: ‘Brithers and sisters, the haill of ye, hearken to me for ae minute; an’, O Lord! gin I say wrang, jist tak the speech frae me, and I’ll sit doon dumb and rebukit. We’re a’ here by grace and no by merit, save his, as ye a’ ken…for ye hae been langer here nor me. But it’s jist ruggin’ and rivin’ at my hert to think of them ’at’s doon there…Noo, we hae nae merit, and they hae nae merit, and what for are we here and them there? But we’re washed clean and innocent noo; and noo, whan there’s no wyte lying upof oursel’s, it seems to me that we micht beir some of the sins of them ‘at hae ower mony. I call upo’ ilk ane of ye ’at has a frien’ or a neebor down yonner, to rise up and taste nor bite nor sup mair till we gang up a’thegither to the fut of the throne, and pray the Lord to lat’s gang and du as the Maister did afore ’s, and beir their griefs, and cairry their sorrows doon in hell there; gin it maybe that they may repent and get remission of their sins, and come up here with us at the lang last, and sit doon with ‘s at this table, a’ throuw the merits of oor Saviour Jesus Christ, at the heid of the table there. Amen.’"

The gold of the story was so overlaid with the obscurity of the dialect as to make it virtually invisible. I sensed the gold there, but I couldn’t quite unearth it.

I did eventually complete the novel (reading snatches at rest stops along the highway returning from my grandmother’s), and over the years our continuing search was rewarded as one by one Judy and I found more of MacDonald’s novels. The more we read, the larger, in retrospect, loomed Falconer’s story. It was not merely the first full-length MacDonald novel I happened to read, as time went on I realized that in some ways, Robert Falconer may be the first of all MacDonald’s novels in significance as well. For what I had discovered was not simply the tale of a fictional character. I had plunged into a moving portrayal of MacDonald’s personal search for a faith of his own—the poignant story of a boy’s growth out of the solitary melancholy of childhood into the full scope of mature manhood.

Throughout his life, MacDonald found himself at odds with the strict Calvinism of the nineteenth century. It had begun in his boyhood relationship with his rigid and orthodox grandmother (portrayed as Mrs. Falconer in this book) and continued through his dispute with the deacons of his first church pastorate. His internal battle against the narrow viewpoints they represented invigorated the fertile soil of his creative mind. For the rest of his life, his crusade—though he would never speak of it in those terms—was against small-minded, lazy, judgmental, doctrine-saturated, unthinking Christianity that placed the ingrained ideas of false religious orthodoxies on a pedestal above the infinitely loving Fatherhood of God. It was a message he would convey in a thousand ways through his writings, through sermons and characters and authorial asides, and by whatever other means were open to him.

Therefore, the characters in MacDonald’s books often pose questions typifying his own growth. In this story, the young Robert Falconer frames the question: If a devil was to repent, would God forgive him? He had already raised the same question in the mouth of Mr. Cupples in Alec Forbes of Howglen. Now here comes the question again in almost the same words.

It’s a staggering notion—one for which we have no answer. But the guardians of the ecclesiastical gates of MacDonald’s day were aghast at his audacity even to inquire in that direction. George MacDonald, however, was not squeamish about questions of such weighty theological magnitude.

When MacDonald visited his hometown of Huntly in August of 1866 at the age of forty-one, with Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood behind him, no doubt a sequel to Annals was brewing in his mind. His writing was like a chess game—he was always looking two or three moves ahead.

But he had primarily come to Huntly in preparation at last to tell Robert Falconer’s story.

By this time the character of Robert Falconer already had what might loosely be termed a long and checkered history. It took approximately ten years for him at last to step into the spotlight as the lead character of a novel bearing his own name. Falconer made his debut appearance in MacDonald’s ill-fated novel Seekers and Finders from the late 1850s. The character of Falconer clearly took hold of MacDonald from the beginning. In 1862, he named his third son Robert Falconer MacDonald. The next year Falconer turned up in the latter chapters of David Elginbrod as a fully-formed spiritual man in London. There Falconer introduces Hugh Sutherland to the preaching of a fictionalized portrait of Frederick Dennison Maurice, who was a pastoral mentor to MacDonald in the exploration of more expansive spiritual perspectives.

Finally, after allowing Falconer to stir in his subconscious a few more years, George MacDonald was ready to tell the story he had been preparing for so long. He probably began writing it almost immediately during or after his 1866 visit to Huntly.

By this time MacDonald’s friend Alexander Strahan had launched two more magazines (the Argosy and the Contemporary Review, both in 1865—bringing the total to three new magazines within a year). His thirst for creative expansion, though good for authors and the public, put great strains on his financial resources, driving him deeper and deeper into debt.¹ As he had done in getting the fledgling Sunday Magazine off the ground, Strahan again brought MacDonald on board for his newest periodical. The first installment of Robert Falconer appeared in the December, 1866 issue of the Argosy.

As 1867 opened, MacDonald was actively engaged in finishing his writing of Robert Falconer for the Argosy. He was also guiding Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood, Dealings with the Fairies, Unspoken Sermons, and The Disciple and Other Poems into final publication—the last three for Alexander Strahan’s suddenly expanding book division. It was a busy year!

As noted, the mature character of Robert Falconer had been developing in MacDonald’s mind long before the actual writing of the book. Whether Falconer’s boyhood and spiritual quest was equally clear in those early years of his evolution is uncertain. As MacDonald began to write, the question is also intriguing: Did he anticipate how much of himself he would put into Robert Falconer?

Whether planned or not, however, from the opening pages the parallels between young Robert and MacDonald’s own boyhood leap off every page, exactly as had been the case with Alec Forbes. Everything is there—the factory, the mill, the town square, the hotel, the houses on Duke Street where MacDonald was born and that adjoining his grandmother’s house on the corner. The fictional Rothieden of the novel is almost in every detail a vivid portrayal of 1820s and 1830s Huntly where MacDonald spent the first fourteen years of his life.

As I mentioned in the introduction to Alec Forbes, the wonderful correspondence of place of the book was borne upon me with vivid realism when I visited MacDonald’s hometown to research the writing of his biography. For three weeks, as I walked Huntly’s byways and environs, I used Robert Falconer, and to a lesser degree Alec Forbes, as my guidebook to the world of George MacDonald’s boyhood. With a sense of living in two worlds, I explored streets and lanes, the ruins of the old castle, walked the banks of the Bogie and Deveron, poked about the bleachfields and the abandoned MacDonald mill built by George MacDonald’s uncle and father. I also visited The Farm of MacDonald’s boyhood.

When MacDonald describes Falconer’s return to the scenes of his childhood, we are clearly reading of MacDonald’s own reflections, probably every time he returned to Huntly. And remarkably, some of those same sights were still vivid more than a hundred years later when I came to Huntly to write the story of MacDonald’s life. His description of the water wheel is exactly as I found it (though the water-course through it had long since dried up)!

He crossed the footbridge and turned into the bleachfield. Its houses were desolate, for that trade too had died away. The machinery stood rotting and rusting. The wheel gave no answering motion to the flow of the water that glided away beneath it.

To walk the streets of Huntly, even today, is to step back in time and find oneself inside the story of young Falconer and MacDonald’s own boyhood. The two boys—Robert on the pages of the story, young George invisibly behind the scenes—become indistinguishable. *

Reading Falconer again for this new edition, I had to smile at the reminder of my initial visit to Huntly—discovering the plaque on MacDonald’s birth home for the first time, climbing fences and looking into back yards trying to retrace Robert’s steps from Mary St. John’s garden to the deserted factory, attempting to place as much as I could from the Huntly of the 1980s into Robert Falconer’s Rothieden of the 1860s, prowling through the deserted and crumbling MacDonald mill on the banks of the Bogie, then telephoning Judy excitedly to tell her of my discovery of a pile of rotting potatoes in the shadows of the mill’s huge moss-encrusted waterwheel. Knowing that the MacDonald mill had been converted from a linen bleachworks to the milling of potato flour, or farina, the sight was surreal. That piles of potatoes was obviously not from MacDonald’s time, yet was so poignantly reminiscent of the era when that very mill echoed with the life of the nineteenth century.

Robert Falconer brings Huntly alive—through the poignancy of MacDonald’s later adult visits to his hometown—just as Malcolm brings Cullen to life.

Huntly’s location on the foothills of the highlands gave it an historic aura of raids and risings, massacres, clan loyalties, ballads, tartans, and Jacobite folklore. What imaginative boy could grow up in the shadow of the highlands and not feel himself part of Scotland’s colorful past? What lad could play with his friends in the ruins of Huntly Castle without being reminded that King Robert the Bruce had visited Huntly and trod the same stones, carried back over the centuries to envision himself standing beside Bruce or Wallace—especially one whose ancestors were among the few to escape Glencoe on the fateful night in 1692? Fifty years later MacDonald’s great-grandfather fought with Prince Charles Edward Stuart and barely escaped from Culloden in 1746 with his life. The imagery of his own familial ties to Glencoe and Culloden emerge in several of MacDonald’s books, most notably in the Malcolm doublet which are set in Cullen north of Huntly, in which MacDonald’s ancestry is woven into the dramatic plot of the tale.

George MacDonald grew up steeped in such tradition. In the very stones and markings—from the Stannin’ Stanes in Huntly’s square to the heraldic doorway of its castle—the ghosts of the past were alive to the imagination. Away to the south and west stood the highlands, often shrouded in the vaporous mists, echoing the faint shrill strains of the pipers of old calling the clans to battle. To the north, less than twenty miles distant, lay the North Sea, never a friend to man. From over its distant horizons a thousand years earlier had come the brutal Viking raiders, plundering everywhere along Scotland’s coastlines.

The imagination of youthful Scots did not have to rely solely on reminders from the past. The cross currents of cultures and languages was no less stimulating. On any day in the market square of Huntly could be heard diverse dialects of peoples, races, clans, and nationalities. From the west—rooted in the western isles and spreading to the highlands—came the Gaelic—rough, melodious, and ancient. From the south of Scotland came the Lallan’s (or lowlands) dialect, while those natives to the northeast spoke their own rapid form of the language known as Doric. From further south an English visitor was instantly recognizable by his book-English. A visitor from the Shetlands, with his wares of wool, his mixture of English, Doric, and ancient Norse was enough to confound any well-educated Scotsman. Even travelers from as close as Inverness or Aberdeen, Portsoy, or Cullen, could be recognized by their unique intonation and vocabulary. (In his preface to Underwoods, Robert Louis Stevens0n comments, I note again that among our new dialecticans the local habitat of every dialect is given to the square mile. ²)

All these stimulations from MacDonald’s youth haunt the pages of Robert Falconer, from Robert’s wide-eyed intrigue with the goings-on at the Boar’s Head Inn (modeled after Huntly’s Gordon Arms) in the town square, center of village life, to the tumultuous daily arrival of the mail coach on its way to or from Aberdeen.

Greville MacDonald writes of life in those regions. There was plenty for the hungriest boys of all that was necessary…but clothes were mostly shabby, and money was always scarce. On the other hand there were cattle in the byre, horses in the stable, wild bees’ nests in the stone dykes, whose honeycomb eaten like bread was a priceless joy; there were pools for swimming, and a river for boating. There was fishing with rod and net, the latter especially when the rivers were swollen and muddy and the trout unable to see their way…To these boys the world was a constant invitation to adventure, for they read into its realistic sweetness and terror the trappings of imaginative romance. ³

And in Robert Falconer, surely giving us a picture of his own memories, MacDonald himself writes:

The linen manufacturing trade of Robert’s grandfather had by this time ceased, although the family still retained the bleachery belonging to it, commonly called the bleachfield…When the pile of linen…was on Saturday heaped high on the base of a broad-wheeled cart, it was a wondrous pleasure to Robert and Shargar to get up on it and be carried to the bleachfield which lay along the bank of the river. Sitting high on the pile of softness, gazing into the blue sky, they traversed the streets in a holiday triumph. And although once they had arrived, the manager did not fail to get some labour out of them, yet the store of amusement was endless…

On the grassy bank of the gently-flowing river, at the other edge of whose level the little canal squabbled along, and on the grassy brae which rose immediately from the canal, were stretched the long white webs of linen, fastened down to the soft mossy ground with wooden pegs, whose tops were twisted into their edges. Strangely would they billow in the wind sometimes, like sea-waves, frozen and enchanted flat, seeking to rise and wallow in the wind with conscious depth and whelming mass. But generally they lay supine, saturated with light and its cleansing power.

As Robert Falconer’s story unfolds, it is against the backdrop of such influences that we find illuminated the relentless pursuit of truth that informs both the fictional narrative and the life of its author. From the opening pages, along with the joys of boyhood, we also sense a brooding melancholy hovering over the boy who occupies the heart and soul of the narrative.

George’s mother died when he was eight. How much the melancholy side of George’s nature had roots in her death we cannot know, but surely it was a huge influence on his dawning consciousness. The fictional Robert has also lost his mother, and MacDonald comments again on his introspective mentality, almost certainly also recalling his own early years: He took more and more to brooding in the garret…as more questions presented themselves.

Eventually the solitary speculations broke forth. When Robert asks questions of himself or the waif Shargar or his grannie, we are plunging straight back into the thoughtful mind of young George himself.

A detail I find fascinating is MacDonald’s use of the unlikeliest unspiritual characters as foils for some of his most profound spiritual queries. It is to Shargar that Robert poses the huge question about devils repenting. And still another unlikely sage, young Falconer’s friend Dooble Sanny, in a moment of rare lucidity speaks the principle MacDonald was so fond of which appears in several of his books, The Lord’s easy pleased, but hard to satisfy. Is it possible some such incongruous character might have been part of MacDonald’s boyhood or youth? Whether or not the boy George MacDonald was acquainted with such an individual, we can be certain that he was well acquainted with the book Klopstock’s Messiah, and its prompting of the bold question posed by young Robert: If a devil were to repent, would God forgive him? That book is mentioned repeatedly in MacDonald’s novels, and surely exercised a profound impact at some point early in his life.

George MacDonald feared no query. In later life he was so confident of a great-hearted, loving, tenderly compassionate God that to him nothing was too large or too small to bring before him. In boyhood, however, openness to high things, and what came to be his unshakable belief in the universality of God’s Fatherhood, was not a perspective shared by one of the most influential personalities of his boyhood, second only to his father—his grandmother, the embodiment of Falconer’s Grannie.

Once Robert begins to voice his doubts about certain points in the Calvinist teaching surrounding him, his grannie is scandalized, outraged, but mostly terrified. She already fears that her son, Robert’s father, is on his way to perdition. Now the grandson seems determined to join him!

The conversations—heated, emotional, full of theological implications, and fraught with humor—between Robert and his grannie, are among the most compelling sections of the entire book. Did young George dare voice his own thoughts to Grannie MacDonald with the same boldness as did Robert? We can only wonder.

The dichotomy between his grandmother’s theology and the urgings of his heart—the thematic core of the book—is powerfully articulated in one of the most gripping and insightful indictments against Calvinism in all MacDonald’s writings.

For now arose within him…the evil phantasms of a theology which would explain all God’s doings by low conceptions—low even for humanity—of right, and law, and justice, and only taking refuge in the fact of the incapacity of the human understanding when its own inventions are impugned as undivine. In such a system, hell is invariably the deepest truth, and the love of God is not so deep as hell. Hence, as foundations must be laid in the deepest, the system is founded in hell, and the first article in the creed that Robert Falconer learned was, "I believe in hell."

Practically, it was so. Otherwise how should it be that as often as a thought of religious duty arose in his mind, it appeared in the form of escaping hell, of fleeing from the wrath to come?…

And he must believe, too, that God was just, awfully just, punishing with fearful pains those who did not go through a certain process of mind which it was utterly impossible they should go through without a help which he would give to some, and withhold from others. The reason of the difference was not such, to say the least of it, as to come within the reach of the persons concerned. And this God they said was love.

And as the boy Robert grew and prepared for college, surely we are treated to a rare insight into MacDonald’s own personality when he describes Falconer’s first months away from home:

Robert leaned to the collar and laboured, not greatly moved by ambition, but much by the hope of the bursary and the college life in the near distance. Not unfrequently he would rush into the thick of the football game, fight like a maniac for one short burst, and then retire and look on. He oftener regarded than mingled. He seldom joined his fellows after school hours, for his work lay both upon his conscience and his hopes. If he formed no very deep friendships amongst them, at least he made no enemies, for he was not selfish, and in virtue of the Celtic blood in him was invariably courteous. His habits were altogether irregular. He never went out for a walk, but sometimes rushed from his garret, and flew in a straight line down to the waste shore of the great deep.

Eventually young Falconer, and his author-creator, left that world of youth and its theology behind, both discovering faith for themselves. Falconer’s sojourn in Switzerland recounts what is surely a synthesis of a lifetime’s reflection within MacDonald’s own consciousness as he grappled with the deepest questions of life—who is God, what is he like, and what does he want me to do?

As MacDonald follows Falconer’s later travels, again we sense that we are reading the author’s own story, if not in Switzerland itself as a young man (MacDonald visited the mainland of Europe in 1865 just prior to writing Falconer, and was as taken by the grandeur of the Alps as Robert), certainly in the development of his spiritual outlook. Of Falconer, MacDonald writes:

All this time he was in the wilderness…he did nothing but read the four gospels and ponder over them. Therefore it is not surprising that he should have already become so familiar with the gospel story, that the moment these questions appeared, the following words should dart to the forefront of his consciousness to meet them:—

"If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak of myself."

Here was a word of Jesus himself, announcing the one means of arriving at a conviction of the truth or falsehood of all that he said, namely, the doing of the will of God by the man who would arrive at such conviction…

When at length he did see what the will of God was, he wondered, so simple did it appear, that he had failed to discover it at once…it grew plain that what he came to do, was just to lead his life. That he should do the work, such as recorded, and much besides, that the Father gave him to do—this was the will of God concerning him.

With this perception arose the conviction that unto every man whom God had sent into the world, he had given a work to do in that world. He had to lead the life God meant him to lead. The will of God was to be found and done in the world…

The time for action was come.

He rose up from the stone of his meditation, took his staff in his hand, and went down the mountain, not knowing whither he went.

When the character of Falconer at length finds his way into literary immortality, he has developed in his author’s consciousness into a man of strength and integrity who is destined to touch all who cross his path. He is a man whose devotion to God had been forged in the furnace of doubt, enlarged by the quest for a higher Fatherhood than portrayed in the doctrine of his youth, energized in the practicalities of life, and perfected through obedience and service to his kind.

Robert Falconer is arguably George MacDonald’s most well-known work of realistic fiction. Two of his sons laud it, if not at the apex certainly as one of their father’s finest works.

Though confusing the order of the published novels (it was not his third), MacDonald’s son Ronald writes:

"In Alec Forbes, the second novel, he was well into his stride; in Robert Falconer, the third…fully extended.

"One may lay his own little fern-leaf upon his choice of a favourite writer’s books…If I were asked to pick out the best of George MacDonald’s novels, I should be found hesitating between Alec Forbes and Robert Falconer. For the first, I should say that the tale, the atmosphere, the colour are greater than any one character among the many which go in this book to the making of that one great thing and two great qualities. Robert Falconer, on the other hand, is broken by its change of scene…

"Whether I be right or wrong in discovering a greater homogeneity in Alec Forbes than in Robert Falconer, few of their readers, I imagine, will differ from me when I say that Robert Falconer is the high-water mark of George MacDonald’s character drawing. The book contains at least four characters which have seldom been surpassed for truth, vigour, and loving humour: Dooble Sanny, Shargar, Falconer’s grandmother, and the great Bob himself." ⁴

Reluctant to take exception, I would offer an alternate view. I find Robert Falconer, even after ten years in the workshop of MacDonald’s mind, a somewhat awkwardly-constructed novel, laboriously laden with digressions, tangents, and poetry, that detract from the enormously powerful story of Falconer’s search for faith and his father. Some of the theological passages are true high water marks of MacDonald’s thought, and eternal treasures for readers who discover them. Yet Robert Falconer reminds me in some ways of Adela Cathcart, as a somewhat inappropriate vehicle, in this case not for fairy tales but for MacDonald to include huge chunks of poetry, most of which have nothing to do with the story. I count approximately twenty-four poems, some long, in addition to even more brief stanzas, along with the introduction of the almost entirely extraneous character of Eric Ericson—a youthful wannabe poet (perhaps a reflection of MacDonald himself in his twenties, but even more of MacDonald’s poet-brother John, who died at twenty-eight)—as but a thinly veiled excuse for MacDonald to shove in a raft of poems.

They are not even his own poems, but his brother’s. MacDonald includes a note in the front matter of the first two editions of the book: The author desires to have it understood that not a poem in this tale is of his own composition. His brother’s poems account for an incredible five percent of the entire original manuscript. That may not sound