Phantastes
A Faerie Romance for Men and Women
by George MacDonald
A new Edition, with thirty-three new Illustrations by Arthur Hughes;
edited by Greville MacDonald (Illustrations not available)
“In good sooth, my masters, this is no door.
Yet is it a little window, that looketh upon a great world.”
Contents
PREFACE
PHANTASTES A FAERIE ROMANCE
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VII.
CHAPTER VIII.
CHAPTER IX.
CHAPTER X.
CHAPTER XI.
CHAPTER XII.
CHAPTER XIII.
CHAPTER XIV.
CHAPTER XV.
CHAPTER XVI.
CHAPTER XVII.
CHAPTER XVIII.
CHAPTER XIX.
CHAPTER XX.
CHAPTER XXI.
CHAPTER XXII.
CHAPTER XXIII.
CHAPTER XXIV.
CHAPTER XXV.
PREFACE
For offering this new edition of my father’s Phantastes, my reasons are
three. The first is to rescue the work from an edition illustrated
without the author’s sanction, and so unsuitably that all lovers of the
book must have experienced some real grief in turning its pages. With
the copyright I secured also the whole of that edition and turned it
into pulp.
My second reason is to pay a small tribute to my father by way of
personal gratitude for this, his first prose work, which was published
nearly fifty years ago. Though unknown to many lovers of his greater
writings, none of these has exceeded it in imaginative insight and
power of expression. To me it rings with the dominant chord of his
life’s purpose and work.
My third reason is that wider knowledge and love of the book should be
made possible. To this end I have been most happy in the help of my
father’s old friend, who has illustrated the book. I know of no other
living artist who is capable of portraying the spirit of Phantastes;
and every reader of this edition will, I believe, feel that the
illustrations are a part of the romance, and will gain through them
some perception of the brotherhood between George MacDonald and Arthur
Hughes.
GREVILLE MACDONALD.
September 1905.
PHANTASTES`
A FAERIE ROMANCE
“Phantastes from ‘their fount’ all shapes deriving,
In new habiliments can quickly dight.”
FLETCHER’S _Purple Island_
Es lassen sich Erzählungen ohne Zusammenhang, jedoch mit Association,
wie Träume, denken; Gedichte, die bloss wohlklingend und voll schöner
Worte sind, aber auch ohne allen Sinn und Zusammenhang, höchstens
einzelne Strophen verständlich, wie Bruchstücke aus den
verschiedenartigsten Dingen. Diese wahre Poesie kann höchstens einen
allegorischen Sinn in Grossen, und eine indirecte Wirkung, wie Musik,
haben. Darum ist die Natur so rein poetisch, wie die Stube eines
Zauberers, eines Physikers, eine Kinderstube, eine Polter- und
Vorrathskammer.
Ein Märchen ist wie ein Traumbild ohne Zusammenhang. Ein Ensemble
wunderbarer Dinge und Begebenheiten, z. B. eine musikalische Phantasie,
die harmonischen Folgen einer Aeolsharfe, die Natur selbst...
In einem echten Märchen muss alles wunderbar, geheimnissvoll und
zusammenhängend sein; alles belebt, jeder auf eine andere Art. Die
ganze Natur muss wunderlich mit der ganzen Geisterwelt gemischt sein;
hier tritt die Zeit der Anarchie, der Gesetzlosigkeit, Freiheit, der
Naturstand der Natur, die Zeit von der Welt ein . . . Die Welt des
Märchens ist die, der Welt der Wahrheit durchaus entgegengesetzte, und
eben darum ihr so durchaus ähnlich, wie das Chaos der vollendeten
Schöpfung ähnlich ist.--NOVALIS.
CHAPTER I
“A spirit . . .
. . . . . .
The undulating woods, and silent well,
And rippling rivulet, and evening gloom,
Now deepening the dark shades, for speech assuming,
Held commune with him; as if he and it
Were all that was.”
SHELLEY’S _Alastor_.
I awoke one morning with the usual perplexity of mind which accompanies
the return of consciousness. As I lay and looked through the eastern
window of my room, a faint streak of peach-colour, dividing a cloud
that just rose above the low swell of the horizon, announced the
approach of the sun. As my thoughts, which a deep and apparently
dreamless sleep had dissolved, began again to assume crystalline forms,
the strange events of the foregoing night presented themselves anew to
my wondering consciousness. The day before had been my
one-and-twentieth birthday. Among other ceremonies investing me with my
legal rights, the keys of an old secretary, in which my father had kept
his private papers, had been delivered up to me. As soon as I was left
alone, I ordered lights in the chamber where the secretary stood, the
first lights that had been there for many a year; for, since my
father’s death, the room had been left undisturbed. But, as if the
darkness had been too long an inmate to be easily expelled, and had
dyed with blackness the walls to which, bat-like, it had clung, these
tapers served but ill to light up the gloomy hangings, and seemed to
throw yet darker shadows into the hollows of the deep-wrought cornice.
All the further portions of the room lay shrouded in a mystery whose
deepest folds were gathered around the dark oak cabinet which I now
approached with a strange mingling of reverence and curiosity. Perhaps,
like a geologist, I was about to turn up to the light some of the
buried strata of the human world, with its fossil remains charred by
passion and petrified by tears. Perhaps I was to learn how my father,
whose personal history was unknown to me, had woven his web of story;
how he had found the world, and how the world had left him. Perhaps I
was to find only the records of lands and moneys, how gotten and how
secured; coming down from strange men, and through troublous times, to
me, who knew little or nothing of them all. To solve my speculations,
and to dispel the awe which was fast gathering around me as if the dead
were drawing near, I approached the secretary; and having found the key
that fitted the upper portion, I opened it with some difficulty, drew
near it a heavy high-backed chair, and sat down before a multitude of
little drawers and slides and pigeon-holes. But the door of a little
cupboard in the centre especially attracted my interest, as if there
lay the secret of this long-hidden world. Its key I found.
One of the rusty hinges cracked and broke as I opened the door: it
revealed a number of small pigeon-holes. These, however, being but
shallow compared with the depth of those around the little cupboard,
the outer ones reaching to the back of the desk, I concluded that there
must be some accessible space behind; and found, indeed, that they were
formed in a separate framework, which admitted of the whole being
pulled out in one piece. Behind, I found a sort of flexible portcullis
of small bars of wood laid close together horizontally. After long
search, and trying many ways to move it, I discovered at last a
scarcely projecting point of steel on one side. I pressed this
repeatedly and hard with the point of an old tool that was lying near,
till at length it yielded inwards; and the little slide, flying up
suddenly, disclosed a chamber—empty, except that in one corner lay a
little heap of withered rose-leaves, whose long-lived scent had long
since departed; and, in another, a small packet of papers, tied with a
bit of ribbon, whose colour had gone with the rose-scent. Almost
fearing to touch them, they witnessed so mutely to the law of oblivion,
I leaned back in my chair, and regarded them for a moment; when
suddenly there stood on the threshold of the little chamber, as though
she had just emerged from its depth, a tiny woman-form, as perfect in
shape as if she had been a small Greek statuette roused to life and
motion. Her dress was of a kind that could never grow old-fashioned,
because it was simply natural: a robe plaited in a band around the
neck, and confined by a belt about the waist, descended to her feet. It
was only afterwards, however, that I took notice of her dress, although
my surprise was by no means of so overpowering a degree as such an
apparition might naturally be expected to excite. Seeing, however, as I
suppose, some astonishment in my countenance, she came forward within a
yard of me, and said, in a voice that strangely recalled a sensation of
twilight, and reedy river banks, and a low wind, even in this deathly
room:—
“Anodos, you never saw such a little creature before, did you?”
“No,” said I; “and indeed I hardly believe I do now.”
“Ah! that is always the way with you men; you believe nothing the first
time; and it is foolish enough to let mere repetition convince you of
what you consider in itself unbelievable. I am not going to argue with
you, however, but to grant you a wish.”
Here I could not help interrupting her with the foolish speech, of
which, however, I had no cause to repent—
“How can such a very little creature as you grant or refuse anything?”
“Is that all the philosophy you have gained in one-and-twenty years?”
said she. “Form is much, but size is nothing. It is a mere matter of
relation. I suppose your six-foot lordship does not feel altogether
insignificant, though to others you do look small beside your old Uncle
Ralph, who rises above you a great half-foot at least. But size is of
so little consequence with old me, that I may as well accommodate
myself to your foolish prejudices.”
So saying, she leapt from the desk upon the floor, where she stood a
tall, gracious lady, with pale face and large blue eyes. Her dark hair
flowed behind, wavy but uncurled, down to her waist, and against it her
form stood clear in its robe of white.
“Now,” said she, “you will believe me.”
Overcome with the presence of a beauty which I could now perceive, and
drawn towards her by an attraction irresistible as incomprehensible, I
suppose I stretched out my arms towards her, for she drew back a step
or two, and said—
“Foolish boy, if you could touch me, I should hurt you. Besides, I was
two hundred and thirty-seven years old, last Midsummer eve; and a man
must not fall in love with his grandmother, you know.”
“But you are not my grandmother,” said I.
“How do you know that?” she retorted. “I dare say you know something of
your great-grandfathers a good deal further back than that; but you
know very little about your great-grandmothers on either side. Now, to
the point. Your little sister was reading a fairy-tale to you last
night.”
“She was.”
“When she had finished, she said, as she closed the book, ‘Is there a
fairy-country, brother?’ You replied with a sigh, ‘I suppose there is,
if one could find the way into it.’”
“I did; but I meant something quite different from what you seem to
think.”
“Never mind what I seem to think. You shall find the way into Fairy
Land to-morrow. Now look in my eyes.”
Eagerly I did so. They filled me with an unknown longing. I remembered
somehow that my mother died when I was a baby. I looked deeper and
deeper, till they spread around me like seas, and I sank in their
waters. I forgot all the rest, till I found myself at the window, whose
gloomy curtains were withdrawn, and where I stood gazing on a whole
heaven of stars, small and sparkling in the moonlight. Below lay a sea,
still as death and hoary in the moon, sweeping into bays and around
capes and islands, away, away, I knew not whither. Alas! it was no sea,
but a low fog burnished by the moon. “Surely there is such a sea
somewhere!” said I to myself. A low sweet voice beside me replied—
“In Fairy Land, Anodos.”
I turned, but saw no one. I closed the secretary, and went to my own
room, and to bed.
All this I recalled as I lay with half-closed eyes. I was soon to find
the truth of the lady’s promise, that this day I should discover the
road into Fairy Land.
CHAPTER II