Sir Gibbie

Sir Gibbie
George MacDonald
Ed. Elizabeth Yates
Schocken Books; 1979 (1879).
270p. first reading.

A word about this edition is necessary before proceeding further, and the word is in no sense a happy or a good one. I don’t know what Elizabeth Yates was like as a person. Perhaps she was a good woman. Perhaps she was well-loved, and a light to all who knew her. I don’t know. What I do know, however, is that she is the unpardonable perpetrator of editorial atrocities the likes of which would make any earnest scholar weep into his beer.

I will credit her with preparing a new edition of an excellent book that had long been out of print and difficult to find. I’m grateful she did, naturally, for if she hadn’t done so I wouldn’t have found it on the shelf at the used book store near my apartment. My acclaim ends there, though, and for several reasons. I’ll let the editoress herself explain:

This is what I have done: I have cut the original Sir Gibbie almost by half, taking out the pages that were a digression from the story; and I have “translated” the Scotch dialect into English, except for certain flavorful words which have long been familiar. Often as I did this I found myself inwardly exclaiming, “So, that’s what was really meant!” The core of the story – the shining wonder which is the ministrant character of Gibbie – is untouched. What seemed important to me was that the book be made available to readers today, not continue to remain on a few bookshelves as a dusty, however charming, relic of another day. [vi-vii]

Furious roar

The “translation” is bad enough, but what on earth is meant by “pages that were a digression from the story?” Yates explains that there were large sections wherein MacDonald included little sermons or gave forth on subjects of interest to him. Quite apart from the fact that many people would want to read this material in its own right (I know I would), I dare say that Ms. Yates is in no position whatever to decide what is and is not essential to the story George MacDonald was writing. The violent, lathe-like spinning of that author in his grave threatens to throw the Earth out of its orbit and hurl us screaming into the sun.

Enough of this. Let’s get to Sir Gibbie.

It’s a work quite thoroughly MacDonaldian. Written near the very middle of his career, Sir Gibbie encapsulates many of the recurring themes to be found elsewhere in the body of his work. The protagonist – better than that, the hero – of the book’s title, Sir Gibbie Galbraith, is a mute street urchin of untarnished innocence and goodness. His serene face and sky-blue eyes are framed by a wild halo of golden hair, and he is beloved by all who know him. Though he is clad in rags and the son of a destitute drunk, the title that prefixes his name is not appended in mockery or fun; he really is a baronet, and though without wealth his family name is an old and honourable one. When his father dies, however, he leaves the hovel in which he had been living and flees the city to find subsistance elsewhere. His travels take him into the Scottish countryside, there to meet many characters of varying degrees of virtue. He cannot speak, but he listens very well and he is animated solely by the desire to do good. Goodness, indeed, comes as naturally to Sir Gibbie as baseness does to the rest of us.

He has many adventures, and I don’t want to spend too much time ennumerating them. Suffice to say that he eventually becomes a shepherd boy, living by adoption with a kindly old couple in a cottage on the moutainside. There he is instructed in the Gospel for the first time, and finds at last a broader justification for the instincts he has always obeyed. The book is unapologetically a Christian one, and MacDonald is conscious of the perhaps shocking nature of just how far he takes it. The Rev. Sclater (a kindly but liberal-minded minster who takes an interest in restoring Gibbie to his unsuspected inheritance) and his equally liberal-minded wife offer delightful if dismaying figurings of the modern reader’s own response to the book’s explicit Christianity. Mrs. Sclater, in particular, upbraiding Gibbie for his tendency to wait on guests at dinner even as the bewildered servants stand idle, has a very familiar sort of tone to it:

[Gibbie] went to a sidetable, and having stood there a moment or two, returned with a New Testament, in which he pointed out the words: “But I am among you as he that serveth.” Giving her just time to read them, he took the book again, and in addition presented the words, “The disciple is not above his master, but everyone that is perfect shall be as his master.”

Mrs. Sclater was as much put out as if [Gibbie] had been guilty of another and worse indiscretion. The idea of anybody ordering his common doings, not to say his oddities, by principles drawn from a source far too sacred to be practically regarded, was too preposterous ever to have become even a notion to her. Henceforth, however, it was a mote to trouble her mind’s eye, a mote she did not get rid of until it began to turn to a glimmer of light. [205-06]

As bad as some of the people he meets are, this “turning to a glimmer of light” is the practical result of his influence in many cases. Few are they who can endure constant exposure to his innocent goodness without being influenced thereby, and by the novel’s conclusion even some who had been hateful enemies have become, at worst, benign, if not outright friends.

MacDonald’s prose (such of it as survives Yates’ editorial shears) is spritely and beautiful, and Gibbie’s rovings throughout the countryside are imbued with a wild beauty whether the diminutive baronet finds himself in storms or sunshine. If you can find an unabridged edition, I imagine it would be significantly better than the one I’ve just finished reading, but even if you can only find this one it’s certainly worth your time. It stands, anyway, as a marvelous and necessary counterpoint to the sort of nineteenth-century novels that one is more likely to see mentioned when inquiries into the period are made. It’s not all Brontes and Hardy, after all.

The doom that came to Ontario

One of the dangers of putting all your eggs in one basket is that sometimes that basket comes over all communist and then you can’t get your eggs when you want them:

Ontario drinkers may find it more difficult to find liquor this summer if talks don’t pick up between the Liquor Control Board of Ontario and the union representing 6,000 of its workers.

The Ontario Public Service Employees Union announced Friday that it has asked its members to deliver a mandate for it to call a strike.

The consequences are certain.

The mystery of the orange peels

A delightful and bewildering passage from Boswell’s Life of Johnson:

[From Saturday, April 1, 1775; pp. 602-03]

Next morning I [Boswell] won a small bet from Lady Diana Beauclerk, by asking him [Johnson] as to one of his peculiarities, which her Ladyship laid I durst not do.  It seems he had been frequently observed at the Club to put into his pocket the Seville oranges, after he had squeezed the juice of them into the drink he made for himself.  Beauclerk and [actor David] Garrick talked of it to me, and seemed to think that he had a strange unwillingness to be discovered.  We could not divine what he did with them; and this was the bold question to be put.

I saw on his table the spoils of the preceding night, some fresh peels nicely scraped and cut into pieces.  “O, Sir, (said I) I now partly see what you do with the squeezed oranges which you put into your pocket at the Club.”  JOHNSON: “I have a great love for them.”  BOSWELL: “And pray, Sir, what do you do with them?  You scrape them, it seems, very neatly, and what next?” JOHNSON: “I let them dry, Sir.”  BOSWELL: “And what next?”  JOHNSON: “Nay, Sir, you shall know their fate no further.”  BOSWELL: “Then the world must be left in the dark.  It must be said (assuming a mock solemnity) he scraped them, and let them dry, but what he did with them next, he never could be prevailed upon to tell.”  JOHNSON: “Nay, Sir, you should say it more emphatically: –he could not be prevailed upon, even by his dearest friends, to tell.”

==

It is eventually suggested (by Boswell, after the contents of one of Hester Thrale-Piozzi’s letters) that Johnson favoured “dry orange peel, finely powdered” as a medicine, though for what ailment we do not know.

When Igor met Evelyn

The unconquerable Craig Burrell has kindly transcribed a delightful account of a meeting between English novelist/Catholic lunatic Evelyn Waugh and noted composer/glorious madman Igor Stravinsky.  Their encounter is well worth reading even if you know or care nothing for either figure.  It’s full of excellence.  Such as:

With the fettuccine the conversation turns — no apparent connection — to the Church.  Here I.S. shines, showing himself to be at least as ultramontanist as Mr.W., as well read in Chesterton and Peguy, and as prone to believe in the miraculous emulsification of St. Januarius’s blood.  From some of the novelist’s remarks, I would guess that he supposes the composer to be one of Maritain’s Jewish converts, which is a common and, so far as the Maritain influence is concerned, partly accurate supposition.

Another crisis confronts us when [Stravinsky's wife] V. mentions the forthcoming New York premiere of I.S.’s Mass and invites the W.s to attend.  Explaining that the piece is liturgical, I.S. says, marvelously: “One composes a march to help men march; and it is the same way with my Credo: I hope to provide some help with the text.  The Credo is long.  There is a great deal to believe.”

Anyway, get over there.  Craig has also posted more photos of The Pious Infant, whose person and needs have been quite justly occupying the bulk of his time these days.

Vernunft is tired

And that means we should all be tired.  Here’s why: Kant scholar George di Giovanni implies something about the slightly later German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte and the charges of atheism levelled against him (Fichte) that isn’t necessarily borne out by the facts of the case.  I won’t go into details (click through to find them), but it involves Fichte’s attempts to defend himself from these charges with the publication of his aptly-named monograph, Juridical Defense Against the Charge of Atheism.

I haven’t read the Juridical Defense Against the Charge of Atheism (though it sounds like a real barnstormer), but it seems like even publishing such a work would be a disaster unless it were just comprised of a single line of text saying that the author did, in fact, affirm the existence of God, followed by his signature at the end ratifying that affirmation.  Pretty hard to misinterpret that.

Somehow, though, I suspect the document didn’t turn out that way.

Anyway, Vernunft is also tired because he’s just wrapped up a series of difficult essays and exams, and has now – at least potentially and apparently – fulfilled all of the requirements of the law school he’s attending.  Congratulations!

David wins the pennant

The New Yorker is always sort of hit and miss, for me, and the less said about some of their content the better, but every once in a while an article comes along that reminds me why I bother to read the thing in the first place.

Malcolm Gladwell’s recent piece on the phenomenon of underdogs beating superior foes is an engrossing and varied look at a subject that should be dear to anyone’s heart. His analysis is astute and inspiring, but also a tad provocative: underdogs frequently win, he says, and would win a hell of a lot more, too, if only they knew how likely their victory actually was:

David’s victory over Goliath, in the Biblical account, is held to be an anomaly. It was not. Davids win all the time. The political scientist Ivan Arreguín-Toft recently looked at every war fought in the past two hundred years between strong and weak combatants. The Goliaths, he found, won in 71.5 per cent of the cases. That is a remarkable fact. Arreguín-Toft was analyzing conflicts in which one side was at least ten times as powerful—in terms of armed might and population—as its opponent, and even in those lopsided contests the underdog won almost a third of the time.

In the Biblical story of David and Goliath, David initially put on a coat of mail and a brass helmet and girded himself with a sword: he prepared to wage a conventional battle of swords against Goliath. But then he stopped. “I cannot walk in these, for I am unused to it,” he said (in Robert Alter’s translation), and picked up those five smooth stones. What happened, Arreguín-Toft wondered, when the underdogs likewise acknowledged their weakness and chose an unconventional strategy? He went back and re-analyzed his data. In those cases, David’s winning percentage went from 28.5 to 63.6. When underdogs choose not to play by Goliath’s rules, they win, Arreguín-Toft concluded, “even when everything we think we know about power says they shouldn’t.”

Drawing on subjects as various as T.E. Lawrence and a pre-teen girls’ basketball team, he offers up several illustrations of the general principle of effort trumping ability so long as that effort is being expended furiously and immediately. The example of the full-court press is frequently returned to, and he makes a number of good points about the importance of turning the tables on one’s more powerful opponent at once and forever rather than waiting for him to make the first move and establish the ground rules of the conflict. This naturally bears upon questions of insurgency (which he touches upon), but even if he were only writing about the girls and their ruthless program of basketball supremacy it would be worth reading.

I am not familiar with Mr. Gladwell’s work elsewhere (though he seems quite popular, judging by what I’ve seen in the stores), but this, at least, is certainly worth your time. We should exercise caution in taking these ideas as a solid ethical metric, for to do so would be to flirt with consequentialism, but there is much here that is of value for those engrossed in the dynamics of human competition.

Shocking revelation

Though I suppose I ought hardly to be surprised, it was with a bit of a start that I read the penultimate line of Johnson’s Rambler 87 (Tues. Jan. 15, 1751):

…the arguments for purity of life fail of their due influence, not because they have been considered and confuted, but because they have been passed over without consideration.

With a start, that is, given its prefiguring (I cannot easily think coincidental) of Chesterton’s well-known line from What’s Wrong With the World:

The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.

I bet this is going to happen a lot, actually.

Slowly climbing back up to par

The last four weeks or so have been alternately fine and terrible, marked by periods of doing nothing and periods of doing everything in equal measure.  I officially put the seal on the last bit of work from the just-ended term yesterday, and I can now devote my attention more or less entirely to the rigorous beauty of Dr. Samuel Johnson, LL. D.

The course looks like it will be an excellent one.  We have six weeks to cover all of our reading material – roughly thirty-eight hundred pages all told.  Admittedly we’ll be skipping many of the less important Ramblers and Idlers and whatnot (and also, regrettably, his verse drama Irene), but we look to be covering the rest of it.  All of this will naturally be supplemented by Boswell’s Life of Johnson (which accounts for 1400 of those pages on its own) and London Journal, and also Mrs. Thrale’s memoirs.  It would be fair to say that I’ve scarcely ever been in a course so completely suited to my interests.  Anyway, we meet twice a week and keep up a pretty cracking pace, so this is going to have to constitute the bulk of my reading from here on out.  All of which is to say, as you may already have guessed, that you should in no sense be surprised if my prose style suddenly begins to drift into somewhat unfamiliar and old-timey territory.  Dr. Johnson likes long sentences and lots of commas, and also great symmetry of expression, and these are features that are easily adopted into one’s own writing whether by accident or design.  I think it may have begun already, actually.  I’ll try to keep a lid on it.

Apart from that, though, expect to see some Johnson-related stuff on here as the weeks go by.  I’d be foolish not to make use of that content, after all.  You need not worry about being scandalized; that furious gentleman was on the side of solid sense in most matters, and wasn’t afraid to kick foolishness to the curb, so to speak, in defense of greater things.

He did not care for the Church of Rome, though.  My goodness, but he did not.

Will return

Shocking as it may seem, I really will get back to this thing shortly.  I just have to make the transition into the next term and catch up on my sleep a bit.  Then we’ll be getting somewhere.  Oh yes we will.