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Публицистика, религиозные трактаты - Публицистика - George Macdonald. An Antology (edited by C.S.Lewis)

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George MacDonald. An Antology (edited by C.S.Lewis)



     EDITED AND WITH A PREFACE BY C. S. LEWIS


     TO MARY NEYLAN

     C.S.Lewis "George MacDonald. An Antology"

     Language: English

     Date: Jan 9, 2003

     Яфд: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., NEW YORK, 1978

     OCR: Диянмяс Ибыукчгуяс

     Spellcheck: Диянмяс Ибыукчгуяс, Jan 9, 2003
"George MacDonald. An Antology"


     EDITED AND WITH A PREFACE BY C. S. LEWIS


     TO MARY NEYLAN


     CONTENTS


     1 Dryness

     2 Inexorable Love

     3 Divine Burning

     4 The Beginning of Wisdom

     5 The Unawakened

     6 Sinai

     7 No

     8 The Law of Nature

     9 Escape Is Hopeless

     10 The Word

     11 I Knew a Child

     12 Spiritual Murder

     13 Impossibilities

     14 Truth Is Truth

     15 The White Stone

     16 Personality

     17 The Secret in Man

     18 The Secrets in God

     19 No Massing

     20 No Comparing

     21 The End

     22 Moth and Rust

     23 Caverns and Films

     24 Various Kinds of Moth

     25 Holy Scriptures

     26 Command That These Stones Be Made Bread

     27 Religious Feeling

     28 Dryness

     29 Presumption

     30 The Knowledge of God

     31 The Passion

     32 Eli, Eli

     33 The Same

     34 Vicarious Desolation

     35 Creeping Christians

     36 Dryness

     37 The Use of Dryness

     38 The Highest Condition of the Human Will

     39 Troubled Soul

     40 Dangerous Moment

     41 It Is Finished

     42 Members of One Another

     43 Originality

     44 The Moral Law

     45 The Same

     46 Upward toward the Center

     47 No One Loves Because He Sees Why

     48 My Neighbor

     49 The Same

     50 What Cannot Be Loved

     51 Lore and Justice

     52 The Body

     53 Goodness

     54 Christ's Disregards

     55 Easy to Please and Hard to Satisfy

     56 The Moral Law

     57 Bondage

     58 The Rich Young Man

     59 Law and Spirit

     60 Our Nonage

     61 Knowledge

     62 Living Forever

     63 Be Ye Perfect

     64 Carrion Comfort

     65 The Same

     66 How Hard?

     67 Things

     68 Possession

     69 The Torment of Death

     70 The Utility of Death

     71 Not the Rich Only

     72 Fearful Thinking

     73 Miracles

     74 The Sacred Present

     75 Forethought

     76 Not the Rich Only

     77 Care

     78 The Sacred Present

     79 Heaven

     80 Shaky Foundations

     81 Fussing

     82 Housekeeping

     83 Cares

     84 God at the Door

     85 Difficulties

     86 Vain Vigilance

     87 Incompleteness

     88 Prayer

     89 Knowledge That Would Be Useless

     90 Prayer

     91 Why Should It Be Necessary?

     92 The Conditions of a Good Gift

     93 False Spirituality

     94 Small Prayers

     95 Riches and Need

     96 Providence

     97 Divine Freedom

     98 Providence

     99 The Miracles of Our Lord

     100 They Have No Wine

     101 Intercessory Prayer

     102 The Eternal Revolt

     103 They .Say It Does Them Good

     104 Perfected Prayer

     105 Corrective Granting

     106 Why We Must Wait

     107 Gods Vengeance

     108 The Way of Understanding

     109 Penal Blindness

     111 Agree with the Adversary Quickly

     112 The Inexorable

     113 Christ Our Righteousness

     114 Agree Quickly

     115 Duties to an Enemy

     116 The Prison

     117 Not Good to Be Alone

     118 Be Ye Perfect

     119 The Heart

     120 Precious Blame

     121 The Same

     122 Man Glorified

     123 Life in the Word

     124 The Office of Christ

     125 The Slowness of the New Creation

     126 The New Creation

     127 Pessimism

     128 The Work of the Father

     129 The End

     130 Deadlock

     131 The Two Worst Heresies

     132 Christian Growth

     133 Life and Shadow

     134 False Refuge

     135 A Silly Notion

     136 Dryness

     137 Perseverance

     138 The Lower Forms

     139 Life

     140 The Eternal Round

     141 The Great One Life

     142 The Beginning of Wisdom

     143 "Peace in Our Time"

     144 Divine Fire

     145 The Safe Place

     146 God and Death

     147 Terror

     148 False Want

     149 A Man's Right

     150 Nature

     151 The Same

     152 Doubt

     153 Job

     154 The Close of the Book of Job

     155 The Way

     156 Self-Control

     157 Self-Dental

     158 Killing the Nerve

     159 Self

     160 My Yoke Is Easy

     161 We Must Be Jealous

     162 Facing Both Ways

     163 The Careless Soul

     164 There Is No Merit in It

     165 Faith

     166 The Misguided

     167 The Way

     168 The First and Second Persons

     169 Warning

     170 Creation

     171 The Unknowable

     172 Warning

     173 The Two First Persons

     174 The Imitation of Christ

     175 Pain and Joy

     176 "By Him All Things Consist"

     177 "In Him Was Life"

     178 Why We Have Not Christs "Ipsissima Verba"

     179 Warning

     180 On Bad Religious Art

     181 How to Read the Epistles

     182 The Entrance of Christ

     183 The Same

     184 The Uses of Nature

     185 Natural Science

     186 The Value of Analysis

     187 Nature

     188 Water

     189 Truth of Things

     190 Caution

     191 Duties

     192 Why free Will Was Permitted

     193 Eternal Death

     194 The Redemption of Our Nature

     195 No Mystery

     196 The Live Truth

     197 Likeness to Christ

     198 Grace and Freedom

     199 Glorious Liberty

     200 No Middle Way

     201 On Having One's Own Way

     202 The Death of Christ

     203 Hell

     204 The Lie

     205 The Author's Fear

     206 Sincerity

     207 First Things First

     208 Inexorable Love

     209 Salvation

     210 Charity and Orthodoxy

     211 Evasion

     212 Inexorable Love

     213 The Holy Ghost

     214 The Sense of Sin

     215 Mean Theologies

     216 On Believing III of God

     217 Condemnation

     218 Excuses

     219 Impossibilities

     220 Disobedience

     221 The Same

     222 The God of Remembrance

     223 Bereavement

     224 Abraham's Faith

     225 The Same

     226 Perception of Duties

     227 Righteousness of Faith

     228 The Same

     229 Reckoned unto Us for Righteousness

     230 St. Paul's Faith

     231 The Full-Grown Christian

     232 Revealed to Babes

     233 Answer

     234 Useless Knowledge

     235 The Art of Being Created

     236 When We Do Not Find Him

     237 Prayer

     238 On One's Critics

     239 Free Will

     240 On Idle Tongues

     241 Do We Love Light?

     242 Shame

     243 The Wakening

     244 The Wakening of the Rich

     245 Self-Deception

     246 Warning

     247 The Slow Descent

     248 Justice and Revenge

     249 Recognition Hereafter

     250 From Dante

     251 What God Means by "Good"

     252 All Things from God

     253 Absolute Being

     254 Beasts

     255 Diversity of Souls

     256 The Disillusioned

     257 Evil

     258 The Loss of the Shadow

     259 Love

     260 From Spring to Summer

     261 The Door into Life

     262 A Lonely Religion

     263 Love

     264 A False Method

     265 Assimilation

     266 Looking

     267 Progress

     268 Providence

     269 Ordinariness

     270 Forgiveness

     271 Visitors

     272 Prose

     273 Integrity

     274 Contentment

     275 Psychical Research

     276 The Blotting Out

     277 On a Chapter in Isaiah

     278 Providence

     279 No Other Way

     280 Death

     281 Criterion of a True Vision

     282 One Reason for Sex

     283 Easy Work

     284 Lebensraum

     285 Nature

     286 For Parents

     287 Hoarding

     288 Today and Yesterday

     289 Obstinate Illusion

     290 Possessions

     291 Lost in the Mountains

     292 The Birth of Persecution

     293 Daily Death

     294 On Duty to Oneself

     295 A Theory of Sleep

     296 Sacred Idleness

     297 The Modern Bane

     298 Immortality

     299 Prayer

     300 Self

     301 Visions

     302 The Impervious Soul

     303 An Old Garden

     304 Experience

     305 Difficulties

     306 A Hard Saying

     307 Truisms

     308 On Asking Advice

     309 No Heel Taps

     310 Silence Before the Judge

     311 Nothing So Deadening

     312 Rounding and Completion

     313 Immortality

     314 The Eternal Now

     315 The Silences Below

     316 Dipsomania

     317 Reminder

     318 Things Rare and Common

     319 Holy Laughter

     320 The Self

     321 Either-Or

     322 Prayer

     323 A Bad Conscience

     324 Money

     325 Scrubbing the Cell

     326 The Mystery of Evil

     327 Prudence

     328 Competition

     329 Method

     330 Prudence

     331 How To Become a Dunce

     332 Love

     333 Preacher's Repentance

     334 Deeds

     335 Prayer

     336 The House Is Not for Me

     337 Hoarding

     338 The Day's First Job

     339 Obstinate Illusion

     340 The Rules of Conversation

     341 A Neglected Form of Justice

     342 Good

     343 Thou Shall Not Make Any Graven Image

     344 How to Become a Dunce

     345 Our Insolvency

     346 A Sad Pity 14*

     347 On Method

     348 Wishing

     349 Fear

     350 The Root of All Rebellion

     351 Two Silly Young Women

     352 Hospitality

     353 Boredom

     354 Counting the Cost

     355 Realism

     356 Avarice

     357 The Lobster Pot

     358 The First Meeting

     359 Reminder

     360 The Wrong Way with Anxiety

     361 Deadlock

     362 Solitude

     363 Death

     364 The Mystery of Evil

     365 The Last Resource

     Sources

     Bibliography


     PREFACE


     all that I know of George MacDonald I have learned either from his own books or from the biography (George MacDonald and His Wife) which his son, Dr. Greville MacDonald, published in 1924; nor have I ever, but once, talked of him to anyone who had met him. For the very few facts which I am going to mention I am therefore entirely dependent on Dr. MacDonald.

     We have learned from Freud and others about those distortions in character and errors in thought which result from a man's early conflicts with his father. Far the most important thing we can know about George MacDonald is that his whole life illustrates the opposite process. An almost perfect relationship with his father was the earthly root of all his wisdom. From his own father, he said, he first learned that Fatherhood must be at the core of the universe. He was thus prepared in an unusual way to teach that religion in which the relation of Father and Son is of all relations the most central.

     His father appears to have been a remarkable man - a man hard, and tender, and humorous all at once, in the old fashion of Scotch Christianity. He had had his leg cut off above the knee in the days before chloroform, refusing the customary dose of preliminary whisky, and "only for one moment, when the knife first transfixed the flesh, did he turn his face away and ejaculate a faint, sibilant whiff." He had quelled with a fantastic joke at his own expense an ugly riot in which he was being burned in effigy. He forbade his son to touch a saddle until he had learned to ride well without one. He advised him "to give over the fruitless game of poetry." He asked from him, and obtained, a promise to renounce tobacco at the age of twenty-three. On the other hand he objected to grouse shooting on the score of cruelty and had in general a tenderness for animals not very usual among farmers more than a hundred years ago; and his son reports that he never, as boy or man, asked him for anything without getting what he asked. Doubtless this tells us as much about the son's character as the father's and should be taken in connection with our extract on prayer (104). "He who seeks the Father more than anything He can give, is likely to have what he asks, for he is not likely to ask amiss." The theological maxim is rooted in the experiences of the author's childhood. This is what may be called the "anti-Freudian predicament" in operation.

     George MacDonald's family (though hardly his father) were of course Calvinists. On the intellectual side his history is largely a history of escape from the theology in which he had been brought up. Stories of such emancipation are common in the nineteenth century; but George MacDonald's story belongs to this familiar pattern only with a difference. In most such stories the emancipated person, not content with repudiating the doctrines, comes also to hate the persons, of his forebears, and even the whole culture and way of life with which they are associated. Thus books like The Way of All flesh come to be written; and later generations, if they do not swallow the satire wholesale as history, at least excuse the author for a one-sidedness which a man in his circumstances could hardly have been expected to avoid. Of such personal resentment I find no trace in MacDonald. It is not we who have to find extenuating circumstances for his point of view. On the contrary, it is he himself, in the very midst of his intellectual revolt, who forces us, whether we will or no, to see elements of real and perhaps irreplaceable worth in the thing from which he is revolting.

     All his life he continued to love the rock from which he had been hewn. All that is best in his novels carries us back to that "kaleyard" world of granite and heather, of bleaching greens beside burns that look as if they flowed not with water but with stout, to the thudding of wooden machinery, the oatcakes, the fresh milk, the pride, the poverty, and the passionate love of hard-won learning. His best characters are those which reveal how much real charity and spiritual wisdom can coexist with the profession of a theology that seems to encourage neither. His own grandmother, a truly terrible old woman wo had burnt his uncle's fiddle as a Satanic snare, might well have appeared to him as what is now (inaccurately) called "a mere sadist." Yet when something very like her is delineated in Robert Falconer and again in What's Mine's Mine, we are compelled to look deeper-to see, inside the repellent crust, something that we can wholeheartedly pity and even, with reservations, respect. In this way MacDonald illustrates, not the doubtful maxim that to know all is to forgive all, but the unshakeable truth that to forgive is to know. He who loves, sees.

     He was born in 1824 at Huntly in Aberdeenshire and entered King's College at Aberdeen in 1840. In 1842 he spent some months in the North of Scotland cataloguing the library of a great house which has never been identified. I mention the fact because it made a lifelong impression on MacDonald. The image of a great house seen principally from the library and always through the eyes of a stranger or a dependent (even Mr. Vane in Lilith never seems at home in the library which is called his) haunts his books to the end. It is therefore reasonable to suppose that the "great house in the North" was the scene of some important crisis or development in his life. Perhaps it was here that he first came under the influence of German Romanticism.

     In 1850 he received what is technically known as a "Call" to become the Minister of a dissenting chapel in Arundel. By 1852 he was in trouble with the "deacons" for heresy, the charges being that he had expressed belief in a future state of probation for heathens and that he was tainted with German theology. The deacons took a roundabout method to be rid of him, by lowering his salary-it had been 150 a year and he was now married-in the hope that this would induce him to resign. But they had misjudged their man. MacDonald merely replied that this was bad enough news for him but that he supposed he must try to live on less. And for some time he continued to do so, often helped by the offerings of his poorest parishioners who did not share the views of the more prosperous Deacons. In 1853, however, the situation became impossible. He resigned and embarked on the career of lecturing, tutoring, occasional preaching, writing, and "odd jobs" which was his lot almost to the end. He died in 1905.

     His lungs were diseased and his poverty was very great. Literal starvation was sometimes averted only by those last moment deliverances which agnostics attribute to chance and Christians to Providence. It is against this background of reiterated failure and incessant peril that some of the following extracts can be most profitably read. His resolute condemnations of anxiety come from one who has a right to speak; nor does their tone encourage the theory that they owe anything to the pathological wishful thinking-the spes phthisica-of the consumptive. None of the evidence suggests such a character. His peace of mind came not from building on the future but from resting in what he called "the holy Present." His resignation to poverty (see Number 274) was at the opposite pole from that of the stoic. He appears to have been a sunny, playful man, deeply appreciative of all really beautiful and delicious things that money can buy, and no less deeply content to do without them. It is perhaps significant-it is certainly touching-that his chief recorded weakness was a Highland love of finery; and he was all his life hospitable as only the poor can be.

     In making these extracts I have been concerned with MacDonald not as a writer but as a Christian teacher. If I were to deal with him as a writer, a man of letters, I should be faced with a difficult critical problem. If we define Literature as an art whose medium is words, then certainly MacDonald has no place in its first rank- perhaps not even in its second. There are indeed passages, many of them in this collection, where the wisdom and (I would dare to call it) the holiness that are in him triumph over and even burn away the baser elements in his style: the expression becomes precise, weighty, economic; acquires a cutting edge. But he does not maintain this level for long. The texture of his writing as a whole is undistinguished, at times fumbling. Bad pulpit traditions cling to it; there is sometimes a nonconformist verbosity, sometimes an old Scotch weakness for florid ornament (it runs right through them from Dunbar to the Waverly Novels), sometimes an oversweetness picked up from Novalis. But this does not quite dispose of him even for the literary critic. What he does best is fantasy-fantasy that hovers between the allegorical and the mythopoeic. And this, in my opinion, he does better than any man. The critical problem with which we are confronted is whether this art-the art of myth-making-is a species of the literary art. The objection to so classifying it is that the Myth does not essentially exist in words at all. We all agree that the story of Balder is a great myth, a thing of inexhaustible value. But of whose version-whose words-are we thinking when we say this?

     For my own part, the answer is that I am not thinking of anyone's -words. No poet, as far as I know or can remember, has told this story supremely well. I am not thinking of any particular version of it. If the story is anywhere embodied in words, that is almost an accident.

     What really delights and nourishes me is a particular pattern of events, which would equally delight and nourish if it had reached me by some medium which involved no words at all-say by a mime, or a film. And I find this to be true of all such stories. When I think of the story of the Argonauts and praise it, I am not praising Apollonius Rhodius (whom I never finished) nor Kingsley (whom I have forgotten) nor even Morris, though I consider his version a very pleasant poem. In this respect stories of the mythical type are at the opposite pole from lyrical poetry. If you try to take the "theme" of Keats's Nightingale apart from the very words in which he has embodied it, you find that you are talking about almost nothing. Form and content can there be separated only by a fake abstraction. But in a myth-in a story where the mere pattern of events is all that matters-this is not so. Any means of communication whatever which succeeds in lodging those events in our imagination has, as we say, "done the trick." After that you can throw the means of communication away. To be sure, if the means of communication are words, it is desirable that a letter which brings you important news should be fairly written. But this is only a minor convenience; for the letter will, in any case, go into the wastepaper basket as soon as you have mastered its contents, and the words (those of Lempriere would have done) are going to be forgotten as soon as you have mastered the Myth. In poetry the words are the body and the "theme" or "content" is the soul. But in myth the imagined events are the body and something inexpressible is the soul: the words, or mime, or film, or pictorial series are not even clothes-they are not much more than a telephone. Of this I had evidence some years ago when I first heard the story of Kafka's Castle related in conversation and afterwards read the book for myself. The reading added nothing. I had already received the myth, which was all that mattered.

     Most myths were made in prehistoric times, and, I suppose, not consciously made by individuals at all. But every now and then there occurs in the modern world a genius-a Kafka or a Novalis-who can make such a story. MacDonald is the greatest genius of this kind whom I know. But I do not know how to classify such genius. To call it literary genius seems unsatisfactory since it can coexist with great inferiority in the art of words-nay, since its connection with words at all turns out to be merely external and, in a sense, accidental. Nor can it be fitted into any of the other arts. It begins to look as if there were an art, or a gift, which criticism has largely ignored. It may even be one of the greatest arts; for it produces works which give us (at the first meeting) as much delight and (on prolonged acquaintance) as much wisdom and strength as the works of the greatest poets. It is in some ways more akin to music than to poetry-or at least to most poetry. It goes beyond the expression of things we have already felt. It arouses in us sensations we have never had before, never anticipated having, as though we had broken out of our normal mode of consciousness and "possessed joys not promised to our birth." It gets under our skin, hits us at a level deeper than our thoughts or even our passions, troubles oldest certainties till all questions are reopened, and in general shocks us more fully awake than we are for most of our lives.

     It was in this mythopoeic art that MacDonald excelled. And from this it follows that his best art is least represented in this collection. The great works are Phantastes, the Curdie books, The Golden Key, The Wise Woman, and Lilith. From them, just because they are supremely good in their own kind, there is little to be extracted. The meaning, the suggestion, the radiance, is incarnate in the whole story: it is only by chance that you find any detachable merits. The novels, on the other hand, have yielded me a rich crop. This does not mean that they are good novels. Necessity made MacDonald a novelist, but few of his novels are good and none is very good. They are best when they depart most from the canons of novel writing, and that in two directions. Sometimes they depart in order to come nearer to fantasy, as in the whole character of the hero in Sir Gibbie or the opening chapters of Wilfred Cumbermede. Sometimes they diverge into direct and prolonged preachments which would be intolerable if a man were reading for the story, but which are in fact welcome because the author, though a poor novelist, is a supreme preacher. Some of his best things are thus hidden in his dullest books: my task here has been almost one of exhumation. I am speaking so far of the novels as I think they would appear if judged by any reasonably objective standard. But it is, no doubt, true that any reader who loves holiness and loves MacDonald-yet perhaps he will need to love Scotland too-can find even in the worst of them something that disarms criticism and will come to feel a queer, awkward charm in their very faults. (But that, of course, is what happens to us with all favorite authors.) One rare, and all but unique, merit these novels must be allowed. The "good" characters are always the best and most convincing. His saints live; his villains are stagey.

     This collection, as I have said, was designed not to revive MacDonald's literary reputation but to spread his religious teaching. Hence most of my extracts are taken from the three volumes of Unspoken Sermons. My own debt to this book is almost as great as one man can owe to another: and nearly all serious inquirers to whom I have introduced it acknowledge that it has given them great help-sometimes indispensable help toward the very acceptance of the Christian faith.

     I will attempt no historical or theological classification of MacDonald's thought, partly because I have not the learning to do so, still more because I am no great friend to such pigeonholing. One very effective way of silencing the voice of conscience is to impound in an Ism the teacher through whom it speaks: the trumpet no longer seriously disturbs our rest when we have murmured "Thomist," "Barthian," or "Existentialist." And in Mac-Donald it is always the voice of conscience that speaks. He addresses the will: the demand for obedience, for "something to be neither more nor less nor other than done" is incessant. Yet in that very voice of conscience every other faculty somehow speaks as well-intellect, and imagination, and humor, and fancy, and all the affections; and no man in modern times was perhaps more aware of the distinction between Law and Gospel, the inevitable failure of mere morality. The Divine Sonship is the key-conception which unites all the different elements of his thought. I dare not say that he is never in error; but to speak plainly I know hardly any other writer who seems to be closer, or more continually close, to the Spirit of Christ Himself. Hence his Christ-like union of tenderness and severity. Nowhere else outside the New Testament have I found terror and comfort so intertwined. The title "Inexorable Love" which I have given to several individual extracts would serve for the whole collection. Inexorability-but never the inexorability of anything less than love-runs through it like a refrain; "escape is hopeless"-"agree quickly with your adversary"-"compulsion waits behind"-"the uttermost farthing will be exacted." Yet this urgency never becomes shrill. All the sermons are suffused with a spirit of love and wonder which prevents it from doing so. MacDonald shows God threatening, but (as Jeremy Taylor says) "He threatens terrible things if we will not be happy."

     In many respects MacDonald's thought has, in a high degree, just those excellences which his period and his personal history would lead us to expect least. A romantic, escaping from a drily intellectual theology, might easily be betrayed into valuing mere emotion and "religious experience" too highly: but in fact few nineteenth-century writers are more firmly catholic in relegating feeling to its proper place. (See Numbers 1, 27, 28, 37, 39, 351.) His whole philosophy of Nature (Numbers 52, 67, 150, 151, 184, 185, 187, 188, 189, 285) with its resolute insistence on the concrete, owes little to the thought of an age which hovered between mechanism and idealism; he would obviously have been more at home with Professor Whitehead than with Herbert Spencer or T. H. Green. Number 285 seems to me particularly admirable. All romantics are vividly aware of mutability, but most of them are content to bewail it: for MacDonald this nostalgia is merely the starting point-he goes on and discovers what it is made for. His psychology also is worth noticing: he is quite as well aware as the moderns that the conscious self, the thing revealed by introspection, is a superficies. Hence the cellars and attics of the King's castle in The Princess and the Goblins, and the terror of his own house which falls upon Mr. Vane in Lilith: hence also his formidable critique (201) of our daily assumptions about the self. Perhaps most remarkable of all is the function-a low and primitive, yet often indispensable function-which he allows to Fear in the spiritual life (Numbers 3, 5, 6, 7, 137, 142, 143, 349). Reaction against early teachings might on this point have very easily driven him into a shallow liberalism. But it does not. He hopes, indeed, that all men will be saved; but that is because he hopes that all will repent. He knows (none better) that even omnipotence cannot save the uncoverted. He never trifles with eternal impossibilities. He is as golden and genial as Traherne; but also as astringent as the Imitation.

    

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