Alec Forbes Is an Unco Bonnie Buik

On numerous occasions, C. S. Lewis emphatically expressed his debt to George MacDonald. He said Phantastes baptized his imagination. He said, “I have never concealed the fact that I regarded him as my master.” And yet, while it was a novel of MacDonald’s that so changed Lewis’s imagination, he also said of his “master,” “Few of his novels are good and none is very good.” It seems it was not MacDonald’s handling of character, plot, and description that so inspired Lewis. And to be clear, Phantastes is, as its name implies, a fantasy novel, and most of MacDonald’s fictional output consists of realistic (not to say realist), domestic novels.

Somewhere in the last eight years or so, I read that, among those novels he thought weren’t very good, Alec Forbes was Lewis’s favorite; I know I read it somewhere because I put a note to that effect on my current ten-year plan. I don’t remember now where I read that factoid, and the source could have been wrong. I also wrote a note to myself saying that at some point (again, I didn’t bother with the details; *sigh*) someone writing for Christian History magazine said that What’s Mine’s Mine was Lewis’s favorite of MacDonald’s novels. Well, the good professor may have said different things at different times. One thing seems certain to me, though. After reading Alec Forbes, I can’t help thinking that Lewis must have liked it better than some of the other novels I’ve read in recent years. Two pervasive features of the book direct me to this conclusion.

First, Alec finds Christian counsel in multiple sources. MacDonald’s novels often feature one Christian sage mentoring the young people. (I always imagine that MacDonald saw in these characters the kind of pastor and teacher he hoped to be.) Alec Forbes has at least four spiritual guides. There’s the minister at the state church. He has no “enthusiasm” (i.e., he doesn’t go in for revival meetings and prefers staid, liturgical worship services), but he consistently teaches godly love, through his actions even more than by words. Recognizing an awareness of the constant presence of God in the dissenting preachers, Alec prefers to go to their church, although he doesn’t necessarily agree with everything he hears there. (They read only the Old Testament, MacDonald explains, and view covenant as the only thing standing between them and what God really wants to do to them.) Alec finds a model of simple and joyful Christian humility in young Annie Anderson, with whom he goes to school. And then there’s the town stonemason, who constantly talks to Alec frankly about his need to escape Hell by getting right with God. I was reminded of the many doors in the foyer of Lewis’s house of “Mere Christianity,” all leading to rooms where Christian fellowship and worship of God can be found.

Second, MacDonald talks in the narration about God calling people "through a back door." The scent of flowers, the warmth of sunlight, a blanket of snow, a windstorm, a gift of a couple of shillings – one earthly thing after another in the story flashes forth grace and beauty and speaks divine truth to the hearts of Alec and Annie. But, the narrator explains, if they – or we – pursue any gracious thing directly, hoping to make the sacred moment last forever, the freshness goes away. These moments in the novel not only make me think of Lewis saying that MacDonald was the first author he had read who could transform common objects into conduits of light, they also remind me of Lewis’s central idea of joy. I won’t try to explain Lewis’s special definition of joy here. If you don’t know about Warnie’s toy garden, but you’re the kind of person to read this much of this blog post, I guarantee that you will thank me for telling you to read Surprised by Joy sometime in the next . . . OK, sometime in the next ten years.

But should you read Alec Forbes? If you enjoy nineteenth-century coming-of-age novels as much as I do, if you love to hate the draconian schoolteachers of Nicholas Nickleby and Jane Eyre, if you think you would like a story in which the male protagonist (sixteen years old?) builds a snow fort and the female protagonist (twelve?) wanders into it and falls asleep and needs a respectful rescue, if you long for a book in which the ultimate spiritual state of the boy is as important as whether or not he gets the girl, then yes, you should read Alec Forbes. Oh, and there’s one more thing. Gin the unco mickle Scots mak ye frichtit, dinna gang greitin’ and speirin’ me a’ aboot it.

My Continuing Quest Through Poetryland

 My planned reading forms the foundation of my adult project of giving myself the classic education of which my high school and college deprived me. (I also continue to study mathematics and languages just for the sake of learning, but I have no complaints about the way my schools handled those subjects.) Of course, I realize that what I’ve learned in my self-assigned regimen of learning, which has been going on for around twenty-five years now, I could never have assimilated by the time I was twenty years old. So I should quit complaining about school, claim victory, and move on. Right?

But still, why didn’t someone in eleven years of public school and four years of college teach me about the music of poetry? We studied some poetry in high-school English classes but never talked about, for instance, the ways rhythm plays against an underlying meter. I hazily remember a teacher once scanning a line of poetry and just leaving the alternating chalk marks above the syllables sketched out on the board, as if we had learned something by looking at an accent mark above the word of. I took a class in poetry in college in an attempt to remedy the deficiency, but we read almost exclusively modern poetry, and if there’s a rhythmic scheme to that body of literature, my professor never spoke of it, and it has totally escaped me since.

In any case, I plod along in my own awkward way trying to learn poetry, fully knowing that, however much I may enjoy Milton and Shelley and Tennyson, I’ll never really get their idiom into my bones since I didn’t grow up with it. Reading even the most enjoyable poetry, I still feel a lot like the way I felt when, at the age of 53, I studied Rosetta Stone Italian for a year and then went to live in Tuscany for four months. And how much sense does it make to read all or most of one or two poets’ works every year? Not much, maybe, but at least the system gets me reading.

This year I actually have three poets on my plan. My first assignment in poetry for 2021 was Robert Browning, and I have to say that I surprised myself by finding a classic poet that I really don’t like. Some I haven’t understood as much as I wished. Some, like Coleridge, disappointed me, but in his case only because he seemed inferior to Wordsworth, who is, as far as my dim sight can tell, practically perfect. But Browning I actually found repulsive at times.

As I said, it was a surprise. I went in to the year expecting to fall in love with Browning and simply to become acquainted with the second poet on the schedule for 2021, the now little-known William Cullen Bryant. But just the opposite happened. I will now smile and give a polite nod to Browning as I pass him on the street, but Bryant will receive invitations to lunch.

And now I come to the big problem in writing blog posts about poetry. I see from my stats that some of my posts about poetry are among the most visited on exlibrismagnis. Many of the visitors are probably people just like me, finally trying to understand poetry at a time when they fear it’s too late. I’m guessing (and hoping) that many of those views come from homeschooling moms and dads who are trying to give their kids something better than what we received. So I feel the burden of obligation to say something profound, something eye-opening about Bryant for readers who are looking for a cup to dip into the pool at a poetic oasis in the middle of the great desert of Literature as Seen by Americans Raised in Public School. So, here goes. But really. Don’t expect much. Just dip your hand into Bryant’s “November” and take a cool, refreshing sip.

Yet one smile more, departing, distant sun!
One mellow smile through the soft vapory air,
Ere, o'er the frozen earth, the loud winds run,
Or snows are sifted o'er the meadows bare.
One smile on the brown hills and naked trees,
And the dark rocks whose summer wreaths are cast,
And the blue gentian flower, that, in the breeze,
Nods lonely, of her beauteous race the last.
Yet a few sunny days, in which the bee
Shall murmur by the hedge that skirts the way,
The cricket chirp upon the russet lea,
And man delight to linger in thy ray.
Yet one rich smile, and we will try to bear
The piercing winter frost, and winds, and darkened air.

OK, let’s start with the main conceit: the sun smiles in the summer, and we live on the memory of those smiles during the winter months, when, as you know, the sun is doing something other than smiling. (Side note: this morning, in reading a novel by George MacDonald, I learned a new, very useful name for unseasonably warm days in November. We in America tend to call this meteorological phenomenon by a phrase invoking a mistaken name for indigenous American people. In Scotland, apparently, the pattern is known as St. Martin’s summer, presumably because the feast day of that good man is in early November.) During a St. Martin’s summer, Bryant asks the sun to extend his beneficence for just one more day, stoking the inner fire that will make the bitterness of the coming December, January, and February more bearable. It’s a pretty picture, and who wouldn’t want to have the cheery sun as a friend with whom to hold such a pleasant conversation?

Now, to do my best at making a technical observation, I want to concentrate on some articles that my old teacher would have contentedly put an accent above. (To avoid alignment problems with accent marks, I’ll show accented syllables in all caps.) Consider the second line. My teacher (bless her heart, at least she was trying to teach us something about poetry) would have marked it this way:

One MELlow SMILE through THE soft VAp’ry AIR

“See?” she would have said, “Five iambs. That’s iambic pentameter.” But surely we ought to read the line in a more normal way:

One MELlow SMILE through the SOFT VAp’ry AIR

Now this I will grant my teacher: the effect I sense only works if you know the straightforward pattern of iambs. Against that meter, which lies in the back of your mind as you read the words – should it lie there? I don’t know; nobody ever really explained it to me; but this is the way it happens in my weird, old head – against that meter, the actual pattern of accents sounds like a change, and that change has a clear effect. To my ear, the two consecutive accented syllables in this case primarily serve to slow the line down. And we should slow down. It’s a mellow sun. The air is soft and vapory. We’re not in a rush here. We want this final solar grin to last a while.

The same rhythmic exchange occurs in the phrases “on the BROWN HILLS” and “the DARK ROCKS” and with “the BLUE GENtian FLOW’R” and in “a FEW SUNny DAYS”: all images we want to linger over on this last warm day of the year. Without the slowing inversions, my old teacher and I would have been accenting the articles the and a quite a bit. A triple accent appears near the end in “ONE RICH SMILE,” as Bryant makes his final plea to the sun to stop for a moment before leaving.

One last note. It’s difficult to write a sentence in English without the letter t. So, of course, it happens here and there throughout the poem. But in lines 2 through 13, the t’s are scattered, like the opposing team’s hits on a pitcher’s good day. In the first and last lines, by contrast, they come in clumps: “deparTing, disTanT sun” and “Piercing winTer frosT.” OK, yeah, I also highlighted a p in that last line. But doesn’t it have the same cold sharpness to its sound? This isn’t science; it’s art. So I can’t say that Bryant meant to distribute his sounds in this way or that anybody else even hears them my way. But for me, the beating voiceless stops in the first line hammer a note of scolding; the sun needs a berating for abandoning us each year. And those hard consonants in the last line make me feel the bitterness of a deep winter freeze.

Wow. Some accents and a few consonants. I’m probably working at a fifth-grade level here. But I didn’t do this work in actual fifth grade. So, better late than never?