George MacDonald | Thornfield Hall

If you have read George MacDonald’s Phantastes, a classic revered by C. S. Lewis, you are a fan of myth, fairy tales, fantasy, and even hallucinogenic imagery. MacDonald, a Victorian Scottish writer, was also a philosopher and a man of God. He was briefly a minister, but forced by strategic salary cuts by hostile deacons to quit the job.

And this firing was fortuitous for us because MacDonald wrote many, many books.

Meanwhile, fantasy classics go in and out of style. MacDonald, best known for his adult novels Phantastes and Lilith, and his children’s books, At the Back of the North Wind, The Princess and the Goblin, and The Princess and Curdie, is virtually unknown today in the U.S. He had a moment in the late 1960s when Lin Carter reissued Phantastes and Lilith in the Ballantine Fantasy paperback series. Since then, I have never seen a new copy of his adult novels in a bookstore.

Still, he had his prestigious fans. One of MacDonald’s champions was C. S. Lewis, who paid homage to him in an anthology of extracts from MacDonald’s religious and philosophical writings, George MacDonald: An Anthology.

I love Lewis’s preface to the anthology, a mix of biography and criticism. He did not think MacDonald was a great writer, but he appreciated his imagination, spirituality, and his generosity.

Most of the extracts in the anthology are from MacDonald’s sermons, but he includes the following stunning passage which is from (I think) MacDonald’s Lilith.

Let me, if I may, be ever welcomed to my room in winter or by a glowing hearth, in summer by a vase of flowers; if I may not, let me think how nice they would be, and bury myself in my work. I do not think that the road to contentment lies in despising what we have not got. Let us acknowledge all good, all delight that the world holds, and be content with it.

Not surprisingly, MacDonald was a lover of libraries. In the preface, Lewis describes the significance of the library in MacDonald’s Lilith. As a young man MacDonald spent several months cataloguing the library at a great house in northern Scotland. In Lilith, the library of the great house is a portal to another world. Mr. Vane, the narrator, encounters a supernatural librarian, who sometimes appears as a raven. The librarian guides him through a mirror to another, very strange world. Much of the novel reads like a dark, dangerous dream.

Frankly, Lilith is often terrifying. In this trippy, often nightmarish allegory, Vane steps out of his own time and space into formlessness: “all was vague and uncertain, as when one cannot distinguish between fog and field, cloud and mountain-side.”

And then he begins a Dante-esque journey through an uncanny world that simply cannot be grasped. The raven/ librarian calls himself a sexton: he guides Mr. Vane through an enormous building – like a cathedral or a barn, Vane can’t decide – it keeps on changing – where the dead, though perhaps not quite dead, perhaps sleeping – the sexton is mysterious about it – people lie unconscious on couches.

Then the novel becomes picaresque as Vane begins his weary, solitary journey. The rivers have dried up – are we in Colorado? – and he finally quenches his thirst with an apple-like fruit. He is assaulted and tied up by the incredibly torpid, stupid giants when he rejects one of their bad-tasting apples. Then he is fed and rescued by the little people, who frolic all day and are perfectly happy and eat healthy, small apples. (There are, yes, some allusions to Gulliver’s Travels.)

Much of the journey is simply incomprehensible to Vane, who is so out of his depth that he doesn’t always react to danger. He is so tired that he really cannot live in fear all the time. When he rescues a monstrous woman, and she rages and asks, Why?, he tells her simply he was lonely. And this novel is about – well, about isn’t the right word – the spirit, the body, the emotions – everything.

There are, fortunately, some light scenes. One of the strangest, almost comical scenes involves a crowd of dancing skeletons in an eerie ballroom – and Vane is so tired that again he feels no fear, as they walk right through him, as if he or they aren’t really there. Then he sees two skeletons outdoors – a married couple who climb with difficulty out of a coach, squabbling all the while, and finally the woman deliberately breaks her husband’s knees. The raven-sexton shows up at this point to explain the skeleton couple are actually in hell.

MacDonald is lyrical, he is poetic, sometimes it doesn’t work, but overall you’re squarely in Mr. Vane’s alternate world.

MacDonald was one of the greatest influences on Lewis, but he explains, “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…. What he does best is fantasy – fantasy that hovers between the allegorical and the mythopoeic.”

Lewis believes MacDonald’s greatest works are Phantastes, the Curdie books, The Golden Key, The Wise Woman, and Lilith. My favorite: Phantastes.

If you’re a MacDonald fan, let me know. There must be fans in Scotland.

It is difficult to find the half-forgotten novels of 19th-century writers like George MacDonald, who is remembered, if at all, as a children’s fantasy writer. Perhaps you have read At the Back of the North Wind, The Princess and the Goblin, or The Princess and Curdie. Perhaps your library still has these books. But does it have MacDonald’s first adult novel Phantastes? Never mind: you can find an inexpensive Dover edition illustrated by Arthur Hughes at online bookstores, and there are countless editions by publishers I do not recognize.

George MacDonald, a clergyman, a devout Christian, and a writer of fairy tales and fantasies, was, by all accounts, something of an intense character. He was dubbed the Father of Fantasy for his wild imagination and love of the fantasy/fairy tale genre. And his influence on other writers, especially C. S. Lewis, was enormous.

In Lewis’s autobiography, Surprised by Joy, he writes that he had long been on a fruitless quest for joy and finally found it in the ending of Phantastes, which converted him to Christianity. In the preface to George MacDonald: An Anthology, Lewis wrote, “What [Phantastes] actually did to me was to convert, even to baptise … my imagination.”

Phantastes is billed as a novel–but it isn’t quite. It is a hybrid mix of prose and verse and could be labeled “experimental.”

The story line is simple, and takes the form of a journey, but there is no particular plot. When the wealthy narrator, Anodos, wakes up on his twenty-first birthday, he is startled by a statuette-sized woman, who pops out of his father’s desk. During their talk, she magically grows into a tall majestic woman. And she tells him the news that he will go to Fairy Land. Not quite what he had in mind.

The room breaks down into a dream. It metamorphoses into an outdoor scene: the basin becomes a spring that runs into a stream over the carpet; the carpet’s design of grass and daisies turn into a border of grass and daisies. As for his dressing table:

My dressing-table was an old-fashioned piece of furniture of black oak, with drawers all down the front. These were elaborately carved in foliage, of which ivy formed the chief part. The nearer end of this table remained just as it had been, but on the further end a singular change had commenced. I happened to fix my eye on a little cluster of ivy-leaves. The first of these was evidently the work of the carver; the next looked curious; the third was unmistakable ivy; and just beyond it a tendril of clematis had twined itself about the gilt handle of one of the drawers. Hearing next a slight motion above me, I looked up, and saw that the branches and leaves designed upon the curtains of my bed were slightly in motion.

MacDonald’s surreal prose can be verbose, but you soon get used to it. I loved the fairy tale aspects of Phantastes. Sometimes the narrator falls into dreams and reads or listens to stories.I was especially fascinated by the story of Cosmo, a young bohemian who buys an antique mirror with unusual carvings on the frame. Naturally, it is a magic mirror; and in its reflection, a beautiful woman lives in Cosmo’s room. He becomes obsessed with her and begins to teach swordsmanship in order to make money to furnish the room elaborately. But how can he break the spell and meet the woman?

Some of the stories are told in verse. And some, decidedly, are better than others. Here are a few melancholy stanzas of one that goes on for four pages. Some of these are better than others.

Sir Aglovaile through the churchyard rode;
SING, ALL ALONE I LIE:
Little recked he where'er he yode,
ALL ALONE, UP IN THE SKY.

Swerved his courser, and plunged with fear
ALL ALONE I LIE:
His cry might have wakened the dead men near,
ALL ALONE, UP IN THE SKY.

As for the Christian symbolism in Phantastes, the reader joins the naive narrator in the struggle between good and evil, learns who the good trees are and who the evil (avoid the Ash and Alder!), realizes that fairies abide by different rules than humans, and pits himself against the ominous shadow picked up along the way. Anodos is always in trouble, because he doesn’t follow directions. And he is also often enchanted, i.e., under a spell, so we can’t blame him too much.

Truthfully, I delighted in the journey through Fairy Land, but the writing is uneven. Some scenes are tediously static. Lots of wandering through beautiful scenery. I preferred the stories Anodos hears to own rather dull adventures. And I alternately enjoyed and was exasperated by the poetry.

MacDonald was prolific, and he loved describing his Fairy Land, but my guess is that some of his other adult books would be more my cup of tea. Still, I can tick this off my genre-reading list. It is a fantasy classic! C. S. Lewis liked it more than I did.

N.B. Anodos (the hero’s name) means “pathless” or “without a road” in Greek.