Baptism of the imagination

I have been trying to straighten up the pile of books by my bed this weekend. Sometimes I get quite annoyed with it and my lack of a bedside cupboard, but the books are always there and one title that perpetually comes and goes from this pile is Phantastes by George MacDonald. It is for me a thoroughly enrapturing little book and I read morsels from it time and time again. George MacDonald has a theology at odds with mine at a number of points and is decidedly anti-Calvinism in some of his writing, but he is a master story-teller and a man who sought to know the heart of God.

His writings, particularly his fairy tales and fantasy novels, have inspired deep admiration in such notables as W. H. Auden, J. R. R. Tolkien, Madeleine L'Engle, G. K. Chesterton and C. S Lewis. Auden claims that as a mythopoeic writer his “power to project his inner life into images, beings, landscapes which are valid for all” makes him "one of the most remarkable writers of the nineteenth century", while Lewis calls him “the greatest genius of this kind that I know" and writes that he has “never concealed the fact that I regarded MacDonald as my master". G. K. Chesterton cited The Princess and the Goblin as a book that had "made a difference to my whole existence".

C. S. Lewis considers Phantastes to have been instrumental in his conversion. His introduction to this book reads thus:

It must be more than thirty years ago that I bought – almost unwillingly, for I had looked at the volume on that bookstall and rejected it on a dozen previous occasions – the Everyman edition of Phantastes. A few hours later I knew that I had crossed a great frontier. I had already been waist deep in Romanticism; and likely enough, at any moment, to flounder into its darker and more evil forms, slithering down the steep descent that leads from the love of strangeness to that of eccentricity and thence to that of perversity. Now Phantastes was romantic enough in all conscience; but there was a difference. Nothing was at that time further from my thoughts than Christianity and I therefore had no notion what this difference really was. I was only aware that if this new world was strange, it was also homely and humble; that if this was a dream, it was a dream in which one at least felt strangely vigilant; that the whole book had about it a sort of cool, morning innocence, and also, quite unmistakably, a certain quality of Death, good Death. What it actually did to me was to convert, even to baptise (that was where the Death came in) my imagination ... The quality which had enchanted me in his [MacDonald’s] imaginative works turned out to be the quality of the real universe, the divine, magical, terrifying and ecstatic reality in which we all live. I should have been shocked in my ‘teens if anyone had told me that what I learned to love in Phantastes was goodness. But now I know, I see there was no deception. The deception is all the other way round – in that prosaic moralism which confines goodness to the region of Law and Duty, which never lets us feel in our face the sweet air blowing from ‘the land of righteousness’, never reveals that elusive Form which if once seen must inevitably be desired with all but sensuous desire – the thing (in Sappho’s phrase) ‘more gold than gold’.

You can actually download Phantastes as an e-book here. I highly recommend reading Chapter XIII, which stands alone as a story within a story, if nothing else.

Oh, well for him who breaks his dream

With the blow that ends the strife;

And, waking, knows the peace that flows

Around the pain of life!