George MacDonald. An Antology (edited by C.S.Lewis) -
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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 baptize (that was where the Death came in) my imagination. It did
nothing to my intellect nor (at that time) to my conscience. Their turn came
far later and with the help of many other books and men. But when the
process was complete-by which, of course, I mean "when it had
really
begun"-I found that I was still with MacDonald and that he had accompanied
me all the way and that I was now at last ready to hear from him much that
he could not have told me at that first meeting. But in a sense, what he was
now telling me was the very same that he had told me from the beginning.
There was no question of getting through to the kernel and throwing away the
shell: no question of a gilded pill. The pill was gold all through.
The quality which had enchanted me in his 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 that 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."