Heather and Snow

By George Macdonald and Michael Phillips

A vivid novel of love and spiritual growth set in the Scottish Highlands from the 19th-century Victorian-era author of Castle Warlock.

This wonderful Scottish tale from 1893, not so expansive of theme and scope as some of MacDonald’s lengthier Scottish stories, is yet poignantly moving in its own way. The descriptions of the highlands and the lives of its people are the equal of those in Castle Warlock and What’s Mine’s Mine. Who, after reading the story of Kirsty Barclay in Heather and Snow, will forget her brother Steenie’s cry after “the bonny man!” Indeed, Kirsty is one of MacDonald’s most memorable women, whose lifelong friendship with neighbor Francis Gordon is the unifying thread through the story, as both mature from youth into adulthood.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Nov 26, 2018
• ISBN: 9780795352034

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."

Book preview

Heather and Snow

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): 978-0-7953-5203-4

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 Heather and Snow

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 Race

2.     Mother and Son

3.     At the Foot of the Horn

4.     Dog Steenie

5.     Colonel and Sergeant

6.     Man Steenie

7.     Corbyknowe

8.     David and His Daughter

9.     Castle Weelset

10.   David and Francis

11.   Kirsty and Phemy

12.   The Earth Home

13.   A Visit from Francis Gordon

14.   Steenie’s House

15.   Steenie’s Prayer

16.   Phemy Craig

17.   A Novel Abduction

18.   Phemy’s Champion

19.   Francie Gordon’s Champion

20.   Mutual Ministration

21.   Steenie’s Growth

22.   Wind and Snow, Birdies and Feet

23.   The Horn

24.   Kirsty in the Storm

25.   Kirsty’s Dream

26.   How David Fared

27.   How Marion Fared

28.   Husband and Wife

29.   Steenie’s Homegoing

30.   From Snow to Fire

31.   Kirsty Shows Pluck

32.   In the Workshop

33.   A Race with Death

34.   Back from the Grave

35.   Waking

36.   Kirsty in Edinburgh

37.   A Great Gulf

38.   A Great Rising

39.   The Neighbours

40.   Kirsty’s Advice and Its Result

41.   The Ride

42.   The Coronation

43.   Kirsty’s Song

Epilogue

"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 shared 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 Touching Highland Tale

As the protographs of George MacDonald we have used in The Cullen Collection increasingly reveal through the years, not without some poignancy, Mac-Donald was aging.

Life’s final years often bring tender, nostalgic reflections out of the past. Through all the years of MacDonald’s career he always kept one eye focused on the Scotland of his boyhood. Yet as his writing career winds down, we sense the memories from those roots extending even deeper into the soil of his being, and bringing new flowers into bloom from out of that treasured nurturing season of his youth. His final two full-length realistic novels, Heather and Snow and Salted With Fire, are not only intensely Scottish, both take place in the central Grampian Highland region ten or twelve miles south of MacDonald’s hometown of Huntly. They are indeed fragrant blooms on the flowering tree of a long and productive writing life well-lived.

Some commentators and biographers observe in MacDonald’s final books, a diminishing of his fictional powers. It is true in general after 1887 that the length of his books had gradually been shrinking (with the anomaly of There and Back, one of his longest, sandwiched in the middle of this period). MacDonald’s non-fiction writing and continued lecture schedule, however, suggest that this change was probably based on slackening interest in the genre rather than loss of intellectual acuity. Indeed, MacDonald produced some of his most powerful theological writings in these final years. They are so pivotal to his enduring legacy as a theologian that they require special notice.

Following the three volumes of unspoken sermons he had already published, during 1891 MacDonald was at work on what he originally intended to call Unspoken Sermons, Fourth Series. He ultimately changed the title to The Hope of the Gospel.

This final volume of George MacDonald’s published sermons begins with a profound treatise that redefines, for those with eyes to see it, the entire scope of salvation. Salvation from Sin, in my opinion, is one of the most significant illuminations of the nature and purpose of salvation, not only from MacDonald’s pen, but ever to appear in the annals of Christendom. If this is hyperbole, I stand by it. If truly apprehended, this single sermon would redefine much of Christianity’s understanding of God’s eternal purpose in humanity and in the universe. It is followed by the companion treatise The Remission of Sins, which completes MacDonald’s perspective of God’s ultimate purpose in the ongoing life of his sons and daughters.

In these two sermons, MacDonald obliterates the foundation of plans of salvation that promise eternal life on the basis of a moment’s decision or commitment, or on the acknowledgment of a prescription of faith or belief. MacDonald powerfully establishes instead the mighty truth that salvation is the ongoing process toward childship, as sin is put to death over a lifetime.

In MacDonald’s lexicon, the familiar term that one is saved does not exist. Life, rather, is a lifelong school where we are in the process of becoming saved from our tendency to sin. For MacDonald, salvation and the atonement are ongoing and continual, not past events, either historically or in any individual Christian’s life. Nor is this process founded in belief in one specific Christian creed of church or theology. It is a process based in obedience to the commands and teachings of Jesus Christ, in recognition of the Fatherhood of God and the mandatory imperative of childship.

This perspective changes everything. It completely shifts the theologic foundation of the Christian message. ¹

MacDonald goes on in The Hope of the Gospel to reflect on many aspects of spirituality, both in this world and the world to come. He comes at last full circle at this point in his life with the title sermon, reserved for the very last, The Hope of the Universe—a lengthy and rambling apologetic for his lifelong belief in the immortality of animals based on Romans 8:19. As dear to his heart as was his belief, this final setting forth of what had been a controversial position during his first and only pastorate is unfortunately disjointed and not the most well written of his sermons. He is more articulate in making his case in A Rough Shaking, published a year before. He also continued to weave comments about animal immortality into his other writings, as we will see hints of in Heather and Snow.

A fascinating publishing note about the production of this final volume of sermons is highlighted by Barbara Amell.

"The Literary World Dec. 21, 1891 announced, she writes, that George MacDonald had submitted a typed manuscript for The Hope of the Gospel, adding, ‘Almost every line of the MSS. is scored with corrections and interlineations, and Dr. Macdonald [sic.] pathetically begs his publishers not to allow the printers the liberty to alter even a capital letter.’" ²

MacDonald did not like editors, publishers, and printers taking even tiny liberties with his texts! This raises the question again which has been a constant theme in our exploration of this writer’s life—who made the punctuational and textual changes in MacDonald’s books that created so much variation in their published editions?

After his return from a brutal lecture tour at the end of 1891, and following the death of his daughter Lilia that November, MacDonald began the first of his final triad of realistic novels—Heather and Snow. He worked on this new Scottish novel set in the environs of Huntly through the early months of 1892, the same year The Hope of the Gospel was published. That summer he and Louisa returned to Switzerland where MacDonald edited, revised, and recast much of his poetry—along with whatever fiction he may have also been working on—for a proposed two-volume compilation scheduled for the following year.

Though his mental, spiritual, and intellectual powers were still functioning at a high level, physically it was a different story. Inexorably the years were taking their toll. There was no respite from eczema, bronchitis, and asthma. MacDonald’s knees were wearing out. He had trouble walking long distances. Sometimes the maddening itch of eczema kept sleep at bay for whole nights at a time.

Eventually the suffering could not but affect his spirit. Shadows occasionally gathered over MacDonald’s mind. Such physical trials caused frustration, and wavering doubts, bringing with them the fear of old age, even, remarkable as it seems for a man like MacDonald, fear for the loss of his sanity. He did not fear death. He only feared the effects upon his mind as it approached.

Rolland Hein comments:

"The sense that his popularity was waning in England no doubt saddened him…

"Frivolous attitudes came to annoy him deeply. On one of these occasions, while he was speaking with an earnest visitor in a corner of the room, an influx of chattering people prompted him to confess, ‘I want to go on talking to you, but I can’t stand this.’ He then left the room, returning only when he had regained his composure…

"In addition to his mental discomforts, MacDonald was beset with the agonies of eczema. He had long been annoyed by this affliction of the skin, but [now]…the problem increased dramatically, giving him as great physical distress as anything he had suffered. He had always been able to sleep easily, but now the itching rashes and oozing blisters prevented his sleeping. At times he neared complete collapse but doggedly tried to carry on, setting for himself yet more rigorous reading programs…

When MacDonald contemplated his career, he was modestly satisfied. The degree to which officials in the literary establishment disdained his work rankled him, but…His awareness of a large audience of appreciative readers gratified him. ³

Following the taxing traveling schedule of the previous year, by mid-1892, MacDonald realized that he had had enough of it. In June he wrote, I have no impulse toward public work this year. I do not think I should feel at all sorry if I were told I should never preach or lecture again. ⁴

In November of that same year he wrote to Louisa that he had never felt so imaginatively barren. He said he would only try writing another major novel if God gave him things to write about. ⁵

Yet in the midst of this time of heartbreak and weariness—with the drafts of Lilith presumably also in his thoughts—out of MacDonald’s heart and brain burst the imagery and atmosphere, sights and sounds of his beloved Scotland. The last three of MacDonald’s realistic novels are all Scottish. As he began with David Elginbrod in Scotland, he would close out his writing life with three more Scottish tales.

Heather moors and snowstorms, warm summers and icy rivers, golden-brown burns, fields of ripening grain, and homely meals of boiled potatoes and oatcakes, along with the Scottish tongue we have not had from MacDonald’s pen for five years, all carry the imagination northwest across the Alps and European continent, over the channel to the Scotland of his roots. We are transported from Italy back to the highlands and their stone cottages with thatched roofs and dirt floors and the friendly curl of aromatic peat smoke rising into the sky.

Physically and creatively barren as he felt, somehow Scotland again drew the best out of him. These last novels, though relatively short alongside the giants that have preceded them, and though neglected by most critics and biographers, yet contain themes and principles that had been coalescing within MacDonald’s spirit all his life.

The opening lines of Donal Grant (in its long U.S. version) remind us what a pivotal role weather plays in MacDonald’s novels:

It was a lovely morning in the first of summer. Yes, we English, whatever we may end with, always begin with the weather, and not without reason.

In spite of MacDonald’s oddly claiming the mantle of English, he is voicing a great truth—the British do always begin with the weather! When we walk down the streets of Cullen to this day, the weather is invariably the first topic mentioned with friends and passers-by.

Think of the openings to Thomas Wingfold, The Marquis of Lossie, What’s Mine’s Mine, Warlock, Falconer, Cumbermede, and Annals. The weather is ubiquitously present. Weather is literally one of the characters in most of MacDonald’s novels.

MacDonald’s fellow Scottish author, O. Douglas (sister of the more famous John Buchan) wrote in her Taken By the Hand:

Yes, she said, people laugh at the British for talking so much about the weather, but they needn’t. It’s one of the most interesting subjects we’ve got. And don’t you like books that bring in the weather? I do. It gives point to a scene, and there’s no doubt weather has an influence on conduct. ⁶

In Heather and Snow, the weather is not merely a character, but indeed one of the principal players in the unfolding drama. We find ourselves immersed again in what we love most in George MacDonald’s writings—the simple ways of country folk and their lives. Even as his own life was slowing, the land of his nurture continued to feed him, influence him, and perhaps sustain him. We are reminded once again that much of the best in MacDonald’s books hearkens back to his boyhood in Huntly. Even in his old age, his imagination was able to pull up these images and give birth again to a vision of a time now past.

C. Edward Troup, George MacDonald’s cousin and future son-in-law (whom his daughter Winifred would marry in 1897) later wrote: "I do not know of any other writer the scenes of whose boyhood were so deeply impressed on him and are so closely associated with his best work. In