Weighed and Wanting

Weighed and
Wanting

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): 978-0-7953-5219-5

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 Weighed and Wanting

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.”

1. A Bad Weather Holiday

2. An Eventful Walk

3. Hester Alone

4. The Aquarium

5. Amy Amber

6. Cornelius and Vavasor

7. Hester and Amy

8. A Beginning in Hester

9. A Private Exhibition

10. Vavasor and Hester

11. The Concert Room

12. Sudden Change

13. Yrndale

14. Down the Hill

15. Out of the Frying Pan

16. Waiting a Purpose

17. Major H. G. Marvel

18. The Major and Vavasor

19. A Walk Along the River

20. An Unpleasant Interview

21. Corney’s Holiday

22. A Distinguished Guest

23. Courtship in Earnest

24. Calamity

25. In London

26. A Talk with the Major

27. A Scuffle

28. Gartley and the Major

29. Further Down

30. Differences

31. Deep Calleth Unto Deep

32. Deliverance

33. On the Way Up

34. The Attic Room

35. Amy and Corney

36. Miss Vavasor

37. Mr. Christopher

38. An Arrangement

39. Things at Yrndale

40. The Return

41. A Sad Beginning

42. Mother and Son

43. Miss Dasomma and Amy

44. The Sick Room

45. Vengeance Is Mine

46. Father and Daughter-in-law

47. The Message

48. A Family

49. A Birthday Gift

“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

A Heart of Ministry

A significant reason for the timelessness of George MacDonald’s writings is that he kept himself from using his pen to inveigh on the multitude of transitory issues that plagued society in his day. MacDonald was a thinking man, widely read, socially conscious, with strong views. Yet he resisted the temptation—if indeed it was such—to sway public opinion, or to use his influence to right the world’s transitory wrongs. His focus was always man’s response to the eternal not the temporal, on the character of God, on personal growth, on what being a follower of Christ means practically in daily relationships, responses, and choices. *

His focus on eternal themes thus retain their relevance, and keep his message vibrant and alive generation after generation, ever to be discovered anew by individual men and women. Meanwhile, the passing issues of 1860s Scotland or 1880s England, or 1900 America…industry, world wars, depressions, politics…as time raced on into the twentieth-century…these all rose and fell on the tides of time. Poverty, slums, war, and disease are still with us. Yet individuals are still being called out of the world to live in the higher air of Fatherhood. MacDonald’s eternal message lives on, as vital and transformational today as it was in 1870. His vision never lost its clarity in pointing the men and women of God’s creation toward life’s true first causes.

It is not that MacDonald didn’t care about the issues of his day. He simply realized where the precision and insight of his writing could do the most eternal good in men’s hearts—turning individuals toward their heavenly Father rather than attempting to right the world’s wrongs.

Yet occasionally MacDonald spoke to the world’s pains he saw around him. It fell to one of his lesser-known novels, Weighed and Wanting, to manifest more fully than most of his other works one of the strongest driving forces in MacDonald’s spiritual vision—the theme of godly service to the poor, working compatibly with his recognition of the deeper need of the human soul to address its sin. MacDonald stresses the necessity for Christian charity and sacrifice in a number of books, notably The Vicar’s Daughter, Robert Falconer, and Sir Gibbie, and infuses nearly everything he wrote with the imperative of actively living one’s faith. However, in Weighed and Wanting, such ministry becomes a dominant theme as the story progresses, alongside the equally prominent theme of sin. MacDonald thus achieves an extraordinary marriage between the social and salvationary halves of the gospel.

In Weighed and Wanting, MacDonald explores societal conditions and the plight of the poor more directly than is his normal custom, bringing into wonderful harmony the temporal and the eternal. He gives us here a vision of ministry to the poor, suffering, diseased, and dying—a ministry imbued with the power of eternal Fatherhood. It is a balance few social reformers and few preachers through the centuries have been able to grasp, as the pendulum of “ministry” swings to the extremes but rarely finds the calm and quiet center.

It is in that center (spiritual and temporal fusing in unity) where Jesus lived and which MacDonald articulated in his writings. I know of nowhere else outside the gospel itself, other than in the writings of George MacDonald, where the balance between love for God and care for one’s neighbor is so profoundly illuminated. And though many consider Weighed and Wanting one of his minor works, it stands almost at the apex with one or two others in revealing, in a sense, this societal or social component of MacDonald’s overall vision of life.

Indeed, it was a vision he lived. The principles and methods and priorities we read about here emerged out of the MacDonald’s own lifestyle. Wherever they happened to be, with eleven children, he and Louisa always opened their home, not to every waif and stray and beggar of the city or they would have been inundated, but to those in need whom God brought them. They took in unofficial “foster” children and adults, and even, the very year this book was written, “adopted” (probably also unofficially, though the family used that word) two girls whose mother was dying of tuberculosis (whom they also cared for until her death). After moving to Italy, with their own brood gradually shrinking, their huge home in Bordighera was nevertheless nearly always full. ¹ Perhaps this fact in some measure helps explain why they always seemed financially strapped.

MacDonald’s was the practical perspective, not of attempting to change the whole world, but only his little corner of it. We can all be deeply thankful that he kept his focus on the essential bull’s eye of God’s Fatherhood. In so doing, living as he did, through his writings he changed the world as well.