Phantastes

By George MacDonald and Michael Phillips

The groundbreaking Victorian-era fantasy from the Scottish literary master. “Without question one of the cornerstones of the genre.”—Black Gate
 
George MacDonald’s first major fiction work, in MacDonald’s words “a sort of fairy tale for grown people,” Phantastes was published in 1858. This unusual fantasy, subtitled a “faerie romance,” is one of MacDonald’s most mysterious and esoteric titles. The book’s narrator, Anodos, enters Fairy Land through a mysterious old wooden secretary. From that beginning, he embarks on a dream-like series of encounters that follow the form of an epic quest, though the purpose and destination of his journey remain obscure and are never fully clarified.
 
Sales of Phantastes proved a disappointment, until young atheist C.S. Lewis discovered it in 1916. Within a few hours he said he knew he “had crossed a great frontier.” MacDonald’s unusual fantasy set Lewis on the road toward his eventual conversion to Christianity, and forever after he referred to MacDonald as his “master.” In spite of its poor initial reception among Victorian readers, Lewis’s affection for it established Phantastes as one of MacDonald’s most enduring and studied works in literary and academic circles. This new edition is one of six fantasy titles in The Cullen Collection that has not been edited or updated in any way and is reproduced exactly in its original text.
 
“It can be exquisitely beautiful . . . from time to time I was caught by MacDonald’s enchantment, by his underlying concept that we can build a land of Faerie in our minds, and travel there.”—Tor.com

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 31, 2018
• ISBN: 9780795351891

George MacDonald

George MacDonald (1824 – 1905) was a Scottish-born novelist and poet. He grew up in a religious home influenced by various sects of Christianity. He attended University of Aberdeen, where he graduated with a degree in chemistry and physics. After experiencing a crisis of faith, he began theological training and became minister of Trinity Congregational Church. Later, he gained success as a writer penning fantasy tales such as Lilith, The Light Princess and At the Back of the North Wind. MacDonald became a well-known lecturer and mentor to various creatives including Lewis Carroll who famously wrote, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland fame.

Book preview

Phantastes

The Cullen Collection

George MacDonald

Phantastes

Introductory material © 2018 by Michael Phillips

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

Electronic edition published 2018 by RosettaBooks

ISBN (Kindle): 978-0-7953-5189-1

www.RosettaBooks.com

The Cullen Collection

of the Fiction of George MacDonald

New editions of George MacDonald’s classic fiction works updated and introduced by Michael Phillips

The Cullen Collection of the

Fiction of George MacDonald

1. Phantastes (1858)

2. David Elginbrod (1863)

3. The Portent (1864)

4. Adela Cathcart (1864)

5. Alec Forbes of Howglen (1865)

6. Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood (1867)

7. Robert Falconer (1868)

8. Guild Court (1868)

9. The Seaboard Parish (1868)

10. At the Back of the North Wind (1871)

11. Ranald Bannerman’s Boyhood (1871)

12. The Princess and the Goblin (1872)

13. Wilfrid Cumbermede (1872)

14. The Vicar’s Daughter (1872)

15. Gutta Percha Willie (1873)

16. Malcolm (1875)

17. The Wise Woman (1875)

18. St. George and St. Michael (1876)

19. Thomas Wingfold Curate (1876)

20. The Marquis of Lossie (1877)

21. Paul Faber Surgeon (1879)

22. Sir Gibbie (1879)

23. Mary Marston (1881)

24. Castle Warlock (1881)

25. The Princess and Curdie (1882)

26. Weighed and Wanting (1882)

27. Donal Grant (1883)

28. What’s Mine’s Mine (1886)

29. Home Again (1887)

30. The Elect Lady (1888)

31. A Rough Shaking (1890)

32. There and Back (1891)

33. The Flight of the Shadow (1891)

34. Heather and Snow (1893)

35. Lilith (1895)

36. Salted With Fire (1897)

37. Far Above Rubies (1898)

The introductions to the 37 volumes form a continuous picture of George MacDonald’s literary life, viewed through the prism of the development of his written legacy of works. While each book can of course be read on its own, every introduction picks up where that to the previous volume left off, with special attention to the title under consideration. The introductions together, as a biography of MacDonald’s life as a writer, are compiled in Volume 38.

38. George MacDonald A Writer’s Life

CONTENTS

Foreword to The Cullen Collection

Introduction to Phantastes by Michael Phillips

Introduction to 1915 edition by Greville MacDonald

Preface to 1905 edition by Greville MacDonald

PHANTASTES

"Papa seems so quietly happy."

—Louisa MacDonald, May 4, 1872, from Deskford (near Cullen)

"Papa does enjoy this place so much."

—Louisa MacDonald, May 6, 1872 from the Seafield Arms Hotel, Cullen

"Papa oh! so jolly & bright & happy…Papa was taken for Lord Seafield yesterday."

—Louisa MacDonald, Sept. 2, 1873, from Cullen

"Papa is very poorly. He ought to go to Cullen for a week I think."

—Louisa MacDonald, October 5, 1873, from London

FOREWORD

The Cullen Collection

of the Fiction of George MacDonald

The series name for these works of Scotsman George MacDonald (1824-1905) has its origins in the 1830s when the boy MacDonald formed what would be a lifelong affection for the northeast Scottish village of Cullen.

The ocean became young George’s delight. At the age of eleven, writing from Portsoy or Cullen, he announced to his father his intention to go to sea as a sailor— in his words, as soon as possible. The broad white beach of Cullen Bay, the Seatown, the grounds of Cullen House, the temple of Psyche (Temple of the Winds), Cullen Burn, the dwellings along Grant Street, Scarnose, and especially Findlater Castle, all seized the youth’s imagination with a love that never left him. MacDonald continued to visit Huntly and Cullen throughout his life, using his childhood love for his homeland as the backdrop for his richest novels, including what is arguably his greatest work of fiction, Malcolm, published in 1875.

We therefore honor MacDonald’s unique relationship to Cullen with these newly updated editions of his novels. In Cullen, in certain respects more than in any other place, one finds the transcendent spirit of George MacDonald’s life and the ongoing legacy of his work still magically alive after a century and a half. This release of The Cullen Collection of the Fiction of George MacDonald coincides with a memorial bench and plaque established on Cullen’s Castle Hill commemorating MacDonald’s visits to the region.

This series of new editions is an outgrowth and expansion of my series of edited MacDonald novels published by Bethany House in the 1980s. It includes many more titles and follows the same general priority of creating more readable editions that faithfully preserve the spirit, style, and flavor of MacDonald’s originals. Six of these newly added titles, which would more accurately be termed fantasy, have not, however, been edited, updated, or altered in any way. They are faithful reproductions of the originals exactly as first published. These six— Phantastes, At the Back of the North Wind, The Princess and the Goblin, The Wise Woman, The Princess and Curdie, and Lilith—have been published literally in hundreds of editions through the years, and are thus reproduced for The Cullen Collection with the same text by which they are generally known. *

Dedicated followers of all great men and women continually seek hints that reveal their inner being—the true man, the true woman. What were they really like? What made him or her tick? Many biographies and studies attempt to answer such questions. In George MacDonald’s case, however, a panorama of windows exists that reveals far more about his person than the sum-total of everything that has been written about him over the years. Those are the novels that encompass his life’s work. The volumes of this series represent the true spiritual biography of the man, a far more important biography than life’s details can ever tell.

In 1911, six years after his father’s death, George MacDonald’s son Ronald wrote of the man with whom he had spent his life:

"The ideals of his didactic novels were the motive of his own life…a life of literal, and, which is more, imaginative consistency with his doctrine…There has probably never been a writer whose work was a better expression of his personal character. This I am not engaged to prove; but I very positively assert…that in his novels…and allegories…one encounters...the same rich imagination, the same generous lover of God and man, the same consistent practiser of his own preaching, the same tender charity to the sinner with the same uncompromising hostility to the sin, which were known in daily use and by his own people counted upon more surely than sunshine." *

Thirty years after the publication of my one-volume biography George MacDonald Scotland’s Beloved Storyteller, it now gives me great pleasure to present this thirty-seven-volume biography of the man, the Scotsman, the prophetic spiritual voice who is George MacDonald.

How fitting is the original title in which Ronald MacDonald’s sketch of his father quoted above first appeared, From A Northern Window. For any attempted portrait of the man George MacDonald becomes at once a window into his homeland as well.

Therefore, I invite you to gaze back in time through the northern windows of these volumes. Picture yourself perhaps near the cheerful hearth described in the opening pages of What’s Mine’s Mine, looking out the window to the cold seas and mountains in the distance, where perhaps you get a fleeting glimpse of highlanders Ian and Alister Macruadh.

Or imagine yourself walking up Duke Street in Huntly from MacDonald’s birth home, following in the footsteps of fictional Robert Falconer to the town square.

Or envision yourself on some windswept highland moor with Gibbie or Cosmo Warlock.

Or walk up the circular staircase of Fyvie Castle to Donal Grant’s tiny tower hideaway where he began to unravel the mysteries of that ancient and spooky place.

Or walk from Cullen’s Seatown alongside Malcolm selling the fish in his creel, turning at the Market Cross into Grant Street and continuing past Miss Horn’s house and up the hill to the entrance of the Cullen House grounds.

Or perhaps climb Castle Hill to the George MacDonald memorial bench and gaze across the sweep of Cullen Bay to Scarnose as Malcolm’s story comes to life before your eyes.

From any of these settings, whether real or imaginary, drift back through the years and gaze through the panoramic windows of these stories, and take in with pleasure the drama, relationships, images, characters, settings, and spiritual truths George MacDonald offers us as we are drawn into his world. *

Michael Phillips

Cullen, Morayshire

Scotland, 2017

INTRODUCTION

An Inauspicious Beginning

Welcome to The Cullen Collection of the Fiction of George MacDonald. *

We will approach the books of this series as a whole, made up of thirty-seven individual parts. We recognize that not all readers will read every book in the set. Even fewer will be likely to read them in chronological order. We will nevertheless present the volumes in the progression of their writing as they contribute to a uniform corpus of written works. In this way they will tell not only their individual stories, but also, taken together, will weave a tapestry of the complete life story of their author. It is this singular life that comprises the whole.

This progressive account of George MacDonald’s writing life will be told, each stage building upon those that came before, in the introductions to the thirty-seven volumes of the series. These introductions trace MacDonald’s literary life through the particular prism of the development of his written works.

This somewhat unusual approach obviously has advantages and drawbacks. Reading the introductions of the various books in random order may not for some readers produce an altogether cohesive picture of MacDonald’s life. Yet together the volumes weave a complete portrayal of that life.

For readers who may choose to read only selected titles, yet want to gain an appreciation for the entire flow of MacDonald’s written corpus of works, the complete set of introductions are gathered together in Volume 38 of the series, George MacDonald A Writer’s Life. That progressive biography examines MacDonald’s life through a particular lens—that being the development of his published fiction works. It will have the added benefit of reviewing the backgrounds and high points of each book. Hopefully this will give readers perspective and insight into those titles they haven’t read, and help them decide which they want to read. This new writer’s life is a companion to my more comprehensive biography, George MacDonald Scotland’s Beloved Storyteller, first published in 1987 and still readily available in several formats.

Though the introductions to the titles of The Cullen Collection are progressive, the books themselves may in some cases most fruitfully be read out of the designated order. This volume before us, for instance, though Volume 1 of the set, is actually a poor first choice as an introductory read for one coming to MacDonald for the first time. As MacDonald’s first published work of fiction (and more particularly fantasy), it necessarily represents the initial volume of a progressive series. But in most cases it is best read after one has been steeped in other more user friendly titles. MacDonald wrote Phantastes at the outset of his writing career when he was, in a sense, groping for an authorial style and method and approach. It is not typical of the enormous corpus of work that followed. In my own case, after forty years of writing, my first published title does not represent my life’s work nearly so well as do my later books. The same is true of MacDonald.

Writers grow and mature and develop in their outlook, in their writing abilities, and in their spiritual perspectives. We have to read MacDonald’s works in that light. His later fiction is far more representative of the true George MacDonald than is this early title.

For one coming to MacDonald for the first time, I might recommend that you put Phantastes aside for now and read a few other titles first.

Titles that would be better suited to introduce new readers to MacDonald’s realistic fiction would be Malcolm, Sir Gibbie, Thomas Wingfold Curate, Donal Grant, Alec Forbes of Howglen, and Robert Falconer.

Titles that will best introduce MacDonald’s fairy tale fiction would be The Princess and the Goblin and The Wise Woman.

For titles to introduce new readers to MacDonald’s young readers fiction I would recommend At the Back of the North Wind and Gutta Percha Willie.

And as noted, you might enjoy George MacDonald A Writer’s Life as an overview and to help you decide what to read and in what order.

And now, as we embark on George MacDonald’s writer’s life and the volumes of The Cullen Collection, let us take a brief bird’s eye view of the events of MacDonald’s biography that led to the writing of Phantastes.

GEORGE MACDONALD’S BOYHOOD AND YOUTH

From a long line of the distinguished MacDonald clan, tracing its lineage through the Glencoe massacre of 1692, and the battle of Culloden of 1746, George MacDonald’s Highland roots and Celtic ancestry never left him. All his life, the rich soil of his heritage influenced his world outlook, artistic temperament, imagination, and the spiritual fountainhead of his writings and personhood.

George was born, the second of six sons, on December 10, 1824, to George MacDonald, Sr. and Helen MacKay MacDonald in the northeast Scottish market town of Huntly. One brother died in infancy, his mother died when he was eight, and a second brother died a year later. George Jr. lost two more brothers when he was in his twenties and thirties. Death came close early in life, and was thus a pivotal theme throughout his later writings. Indeed, his own earliest definable memory, as he recalled it, was of a funeral. ¹ He explored death’s complexities and eternal implications with insight, tenderness, and pathos in many of his writings, always with a hopeful confidence in the Infinite Goodness that lay beyond it.

Young George’s childhood provided a rich milieu that wove into the tapestry of the future man hues as varied and subtle as the heather that adorned the hills surrounding Huntly. Boyhood escapades intermingled freely with a reflective melancholy that brooded on the nature of God and the meaning of the universe. The autobiographical glimpses into these years from his later writings give us the outgoing, gregarious, mischievous, fun-loving Alec Forbes and Ranald Bannerman, along with Cosmo Warlock’s reflections on the cycle of water giving life to the earth and Robert Falconer’s inquiry into the nature of salvation and the repentance of devils. These and many other fictional images of boyhood from his works combine to characterize the temperament of their author and reveal a multi-faceted picture of his early life in Huntly.

MacDonald’s distant cousin and son-in-law Edward Troup (husband of his daughter Winifred) wrote in 1924: "The essential truth of George MacDonald’s boyhood will be found in Ranald Bannerman and in Alec Forbes of Howglen—not that, save in a few instances, actual incidents are related: but if you will regard Ranald and Alec as George MacDonald in boyhood, you will know what atmosphere he lived in, what were the conditions and outward circumstances of his life, and what were the influences that formed his character." ²

MacDonald’s formative years seem to have been shaped by three overspreading (and certainly many lesser) influences. The first was his relationship with his father as a lifelong role model of goodness, and a human-image (obviously flawed but nonetheless real) of the character of God. The second was his relationship with his fiercely rigid and doctrinally unyielding Calvinist grandmother, who, along with aunts and other relatives, helped with daily mothering duties after the death of his mother. His grandmother is a woman vividly portrayed in Robert Falconer.

These two towering personalities of boyhood—the one of light, the other of darkness—set up the conflict that would largely define George MacDonald’s quest to discover and know the true nature and character of God: Was he a good and loving Father to all mankind and indeed all his creation, or was he an eternally wrathful Judge who would allow the elect into heaven but punish everyone else forever in hell? ³

C.S. Lewis places these two personalities into perspective, giving an insight that sets us on a path to understanding much in MacDonald’s later writings:

"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…his son reports that he never, as a 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…

"George Macdonald’s [sic] 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…in most such stories the emancipated person, not content with repudiating the doctrines, comes also to hate…his forebears, and even the whole culture and way of life with which they are associated…Of such personal resentment I find no trace in Macdonald [sic]…

"His own grandmother, a truly terrible old woman who had burnt his uncle’s fiddle as a Satanic snare, might well have appeared to him as…a…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." ⁴

A third influence, not a spiritual one, was the simple boyish delight of freedom—of escape, to use Lewis’s word, from the darkness of his grandmother’s watchful eye and stern theology, escape from the rigid confines of the Sabbath and a cruel schoolmaster and Sunday’s boring sermons, escape into the joy of frolic and play and swimming and fun and laughter. Robert Falconer’s kite and violin are fit symbols of this merriment of boyhood, types of the freedom of the human spirit that yearns to soar both inwardly (the violin) and outwardly (the kite). The escape out of darkness into the light is further epitomized by Alec Forbes’s whooping delight to be let out of school, by the heaven of Robert’s and Shargar’s visits to Mr. Lammie’s farm, and by young George’s real-life holidays to the seashore and frequent visits with aunts, uncles, and cousins in Portsoy and Banff north of Huntly.

With family and relatives he often visited the village of Cullen five miles west of Portsoy along the North Sea coast. MacDonald’s son-in-law wrote, For their holidays the family went sometimes to the Cabrach, often to one of the coast towns—usually Cullen. ⁵ The ocean became young George’s delight. At the age of eleven, in a letter home to the Farm in Huntly, probably from Cullen, ⁶ he announced to his father his intention to go to sea as a sailor—in his words, as soon as possible.

He writes:

My dear Father,

It is now time for me to be thinking what I should betake myself to, and tho’ I would be sorry to displease you in any way, yet I must tell you that the sea is my delight and that I wish to go to it as soon as possible, and I hope that you will not use your parental authority to prevent me, as you undoubtedly can. I feel I would be continually wishing and longing to be at sea. Though a dangerous, it is undoubtedly an honest and lawful employment, or I would scorn to be engaged in it. Whatever other things I may have intended were in my childhood days [so] that you can hardly blame me for being flighty in this respect. O let me, dear father, for I could not be happy at anything else. And I am not altogether ignorant of sea affairs, tho’ I have yet a great deal to learn, for I have been studying them for some time back…

Your affectionate son.

George. ⁷

The village of Cullen and its environs, especially the mysterious and eerie ruins of Findlater Castle, seized the youth’s imagination with a love that remained with him, later powerfully portrayed in what is arguably his greatest work of fiction, Malcolm.

By the time George MacDonald, Sr. remarried—to Margaret McColl in 1839—his thoughtful son was nearly out from under his grandmother’s Calvinist shadow. George Jr. left for King’s College in Aberdeen the following year, embarking at fifteen on studies in chemistry and physics— or as it was then called, Natural Philosophy. Though already of a poetic bent, his initial career objective was in chemistry, for which he envisioned further studies in Germany.

STRUGGLES OF FAITH

Now in a sense on his own, maturing in the intellectually stimulating environment of one of Scotland’s major universities, George MacDonald was soon engaged in the internal quest to know who God is, to know himself, and to know where he and God stood together. Would his grandmother’s Calvinism turn him against a supposed wrathful and unforgiving God into unbelief? Or would the shining example of his father turn him toward a God of goodness and a relationship of intimacy with him? He would spend his university years between 1840 and 1845 trying to answer those questions.

These were years of spiritual doubt, conflict, and question as he struggled either to find faith or reject it. If the former, he must discover a faith that he could make his own. He must find the true nature of God such that, if indeed he was God, he could believe in him with all his heart. Letters from these years are few. They reveal little about MacDonald’s inner spiritual quest. ⁸ His personal writings between 1845 and 1848, however, looking retrospectively back on his university years, though it is clear he is still trying to place his beliefs into a larger perspective, provide us many windows into his struggles of faith. (See the two footnotes, MacDonald’s Dawning Spirituality After University, and MacDonald’s Application to Highbury.)

From my own long study of MacDonald’s life and writings, I would identify the following factors that influenced his university years.

George MacDonald wanted to find a faith of his own. In spite of the harsher elements of its Calvinistic creed, the Christian upbringing in which he had been steeped remained precious to him. He had doubts, but he wanted to know his father’s God, but know him truly and personally. He was not predisposed to reject the Christian faith. His so-called doubts were windows into unknown regions he needed to explore for himself.

Later in his life he would write, Doubts are the messengers of the Living One to rouse the honest. They are the first knock at our door of things that are not yet, but have to be, understood; and theirs in general is the inhospitable reception of angels that do not come in their own likeness. Doubt must precede every deeper assurance; for uncertainties are what we first see when we look into a region hitherto unknown, unexplored, unannexed. ⁹

Such a time of faith-clarifying knockings characterized the doubts of student George MacDonald’s spiritual search. Until the light broke through, it was a season of anguished melancholy soul-searching. However, he was a young man of emotional extremes. And in the midst of his search, the opposite side of his nature was just as likely to break out in exuberance, exhilaration, and laughter. His was a complex, thoughtful, emotional temperament with balancing extremes of highs and lows.

Sometime between 1842 and 1843, possibly taking a break from his university schooling, MacDonald is conjectured to have spent some months cataloguing a great library in the north. (The prevailing assumption, based on Greville MacDonald’s biography of his parents, George MacDonald and His Wife, is that it was the library of Thurso Castle, now in ruins, near the northernmost point of mainland Scotland.) This represents one of the mysterious unknowns of MacDonald’s biography about which exists much speculation, including that MacDonald encountered a woman of ambiguous character at the time, and possibly fell in love with her. This episode will be discussed in greater detail in the introductions to The Portent and Alec Forbes of Howglen. Whatever took place, a fascinating array of cunning, deceptive, and cruel women have found their way into the MacDonald corpus, beginning here with Phantastes and continuing all the way to Lilith. Whether these portrayals indeed have roots in whatever took place during MacDonald’s (potential) library interlude, and whether the youthful student was jilted by a flirtatious young woman who became a model for later fictional characters, we will probably never know. But speculation about this possibility is a favorite topic in MacDonald lore and literature. It was also at this time that MacDonald came under the influence of various German writers—possibly discovered in the northern library—including the poet Novalis, and what is loosely termed German Romanticism.

By the time of MacDonald’s graduation from