Classics Club: Phantastes - A Faerie Romance by George MacDonald (1858)

Phantastes is a peculiar little book. A little over 200 pages, it is like falling into a deep sleep and rambling through a fantasy world with very little cohesiveness to provide a substantial backbone or plot to the experience.

I read Phantastes for the Classics Club, specifically for Classics Club Spin #25. You can find my Classics Club list HERE.

The reader follows the adventures of Anodos, a young man whose name is proclaimed maybe three times throughout the entire book so it is easy to forget. He uncovers a pile of rose petals in the desk of his recently deceased father and as he does so, a wizened old lady pops out of nowhere. She declares that on the morrow he will begin his journey in Fairy Land, since he had so wistfully read a fairy tale to one of his sisters the previous night and mused that there likely was a Fairy Land if one could only get into it.

Anodos awakens the next day to a stream in his bedchamber and lichen and grass and all sorts of things that don't belong and when he follows the stream, he finds himself out of his own home and country and now a wanderer in Fairy Land. For what else could it be?

Anodos finds that there are trees willing to help him and trees willing to harm him, that there are people who live on the borders of Fairy Land, some who realize it and some who do not. He meets actual fairies in the garden of a woman and her daughter who take him in for the night, and he sings awake a lady encased in alabaster that he finds in a cave and who escapes from him into the forest. He is betrayed by a youth and ends up in the home of an ogre where he foolishly opens the wrong door, one of infinity, and obtains for himself a permanent, black shadow. He stumbles into a fairy castle where he cannot see them but knows they are there and spends time reading fairy stories in their library. He battles three giants with two princely brothers and develops a swelled head about his might and prowess.

And ultimately, twenty-one days later, and he is twenty-one years old, Anodos winds up back home, rid of his dark and shadowy company of pride and arrogance, and a much wiser young man.

I barely touched on the basics of this story. As I said, it flows like a dream, one door leading somewhere that it can't possibly lead, and experiences that should not tie together being experienced as one. It's a very fluid sort of book as if George MacDonald truly just wanted to write about Fairy Land but did not want to incorporate something as corporeal as a plot.

I can't disagree with his choice. Phantastes is an enchanting, although not an easy, read and I enjoyed it immensely. I only understood a portion of it, like when you read Shakespeare for the first time and realize you need to read the play again, and possibly a third time, in order to grasp more and more of the meaning and intention of the author.

What I do know is that Anodos emerged from his adventure a far less selfish man than he was when he entered it. Once he begins to view himself through a window of humility, the nobler he becomes. Sacrifice is something he begins to understand, and he lets go of things his heart desires, like the lady in Alabaster, because she is not his to have.

For the curious, yes, it is easy to see how MacDonald inspired both J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. MacDonald paints vivid pictures in the mind that, just like with impressionist artists, are best understood when taking a few steps back in order to take in the whole picture. I didn't even know what I thought of Phantastes until the end when I could finally, fully start to experience the full picture.

Memorable Quotes from Phantastes

“It is by loving, and not by being loved, that one can come nearest the soul of another; yea, that, where two love, it is the loving of each other, and not the being loved by each other, that originates and perfects and assures their blessedness. I knew that love gives to him that loveth, power over any soul beloved, even if that soul know him not, bringing him inwardly close to that spirit; a power that cannot be but for good; for in proportion as selfishness intrudes, the love ceases, and the power which springs therefrom dies. Yet all love will, one day, meet with its return.”

“As in all sweetest music, a tinge of sadness was in every note. Nor do we know how much of the pleasures even of life we owe to the intermingled sorrows. Joy cannot unfold the deepest truths, although deepest truth must be deepest joy.”

“I learned that it is better, a thousand-fold, for a proud man to fall and be humbled, than to hold up his head in his pride and fancied innocence. I learned that he that will be a hero, will barely be a man; that he that will be nothing but a doer of his work, is sure of his manhood. In nothing was my ideal lowered, or dimmed, or grown less precious; I only saw it too plainly, to set myself for a moment beside it. Indeed, my ideal soon became my life; whereas, formerly, my life had consisted in a vain attempt to behold, if not my ideal in myself, at least myself in my ideal.”

“My spirits rose as I went deeper; into the forest; but I could not regain my former elasticity of mind. I found cheerfulness to be like life itself - not to be created by any argument. Afterwards I learned, that the best way to manage some kinds of pain fill thoughts, is to dare them to do their worst; to let them lie and gnaw at your heart till they are tired; and you find you still have a residue of life they cannot kill. So, better and worse, I went on, till I came to a little clearing in the forest.”