It would be hard to find any book in the English tongue that, by imaginative gift, more plainly displays the hidden grandeur and heroic strife in common life than «Sir Gibbie». Things may be weighed, photographed and proved, but the idea that has quickened them into being is not demonstrable save through poetic utterance. Yet, although this story could not have been told save by a poet — indeed by this particular poet — it concerns quite ordinary men and women. For I claim, and I think the writer of «Sir Gibbie» would allow me the claim, that the people of his story are quite ordinary in so far as they live their uncommon or vulgar lives, think their luminous or dull thoughts, on bleak hill-top or in cushioned pulpit, solely because they possess [word missing?] the common faculties with which all humanity is endowed.

Some may think «Sir Gibbie» too like a fairy tale in its idyllic people — but only if they do not know their fellow men; others may think it too realistic in its tragedy and comedy — but only if they do not believe in saints and spiritual magic. Possible['possibly'?] we may allow that never did there exist such a being as Gibbie, at once so piteously inefficient in his dumbness and so triumphantly blessed in the ministrant joy he radiates, and labours to lavish, upon his world. To him love and joy are integral in life; and weaklings holding this faith may move mountains where the physically efficient will discover only prohibitions. But, granted that there never was a person exactly handicapped and exactly gifted as Gibbie, never one with such heritage, education and wealth, we may well doubt if, since the days of Adam and Eve, two persons have ever been made alike. Do we not know many a man too unutterable even for realistic fiction? Have we never known any men and women intimately enough to make us realise that, just because they are so richly eccentric in the things they live and die for, we must perforce believe in God?

Even accepting Gibbie's infirmity, quite unique, I admit, in the annals of psychology, I dare not say such a person had never been and therefore could not be. Whether as the eight-year-old child lavishing protection, love and worship upon that derelict baronet, his drunken father who, rising from his anguished prayer that he be not led into temptation, straightway goes to the nearest public house; whether as the orphaned waif fleeing «up Daurside»! away from the horror of his friend black Sambo, cold, motionless, covered with blood; whether as the town-bred child discovering the barn and its golden straw to sleep in, the rats and their incorruptible policeman, the cat — from whom the dairy door must be kept shut! — or watching the two flails pounding beside him, while «the oats flew and the chaff fluttered and the straw flattened and broke and thinned and spread, until at last they thundered in great hard blows on the wooden floor;» whether, in hiding and hunger, gazing on the peat fire, the butter-making, the porridge-pot boiling «like a wild volcano,» and then the farm-hands devouring their breakfast; or whether meeting Donal Grant and Janet his mother — shepherd folk, who «shall preserve the honour and truth of our Britain when those who place her glory in knowledge or in riches shall have passed from her history as the smoke from her chimneys;» or whether playing the ministrant brownie, and cruelly beaten for his pains; — the whole is instinct with the magic of country ways and God-loving peasants, and yet it is as finely realistic as Tolstoy's work itself in the fearless presentation of the tragic and the vulgar, the pathetic and ultimately triumphant.

Indeed it is interesting to compare the work of Tolstoy and George MacDonald, each believing in nothing so surely as that «God hath made man upright though they have sought out many inventions.» In imaginative insight into the deep heart of man, they stand — I, daring in the comparison, yet venture to assert it — side by side. The one, perceiving in the first place divinity in man, comes therefore to believe in God; the other, perceiving primarily humanity in God, comes therefore to believe in man. The one triumphs in realistic vision, the other in imaginative fact. The one is an artist, portraying things and thereby finding their glory; the other a poet, having visions of truth and therein driven to sing of the things that reveal it. Truth being all in all, equally the need of child, saint, philosopher and poet, must be manifest in many ways, perhaps in many creeds and dogmas. If, as William Blake has it, the fool sees not the same tree that the wise man sees, it must be no less true that ten wise men looking upon the same tree will behold ten several trees; or, if they be abnormally wise, possibly twenty.

«Sir Gibbie» is, I think, at once the most direct and most beautiful of all George MacDonald's novels. It is so simple and stirring in its narrative, so invigorating in its mountain-air and running waters, so happy, humorous, and pathetic, that children as much delight in its magic as they cherish the enchantment of his fairy tales. It teaches, too, everything it was his mission to teach; yet, less than any of his other finest novels, is it didactic. His life's warfare against vulgarity in art, professionalism in religion, wage estimate of labour, dogmatic interpretations of the Infinite Love, class-worship and spiritual wickedness in high places, marches through the pages of this book with bagpipes and bonnet and broadsword, making young and old feel a heroic joy in the eternal fight. «Whenever», he says, «there is a humble, thoughtful nature, into that nature the Spirit of God presses as into its own place.»

That the child is father of the man holds as true in «Sir Gibbie» as in «The Prelude». Possibly to no other writers does it apply so aptly as to Wordsworth and George MacDonald. Nearly all the finest work of both is the direct outcome of the child's or youth's poignant impressions — impressions to be glorified in the mature thought and virile word of later years. Written when my father was fifty-four, «Sir Gibbie» glows with that passion «which is highest reason in a soul sublime», as Wordsworth has it — the passion of childhood running wild, the passion of youth held in sacrificial bondage, the passion of worship in declining years. The book, perhaps more than any of his others, is illustrative of its writer's buoyant content in Nature, his fidelity to all he believed, his indomitable fortitude. «Robert Falconer» may be more significant of the intellectual anguish and triumph through which his youth must have passed before he could write any one of his greater works. «The Diary of an Old Soul» is again perhaps more wonderful because it witnesses an evolution from keen sympathy with Nature to ardent oneness with the Godhead. But «Sir Gibbie», I think, may outlive them both if only because it will be more universally loved and understood.

1914